>RANCHO ESTATES - LONG BEACH
Newcomers bring a wave of recognition and design flair
to this special SoCal neighborhood of Cliff May Ranchos

From the pages of CA-Modern magazine
By Dave Weinstein

They used to be everywhere. Original doors for Cliff May houses, two-and-a-half feet wide, with glass panes above and below, could be found discarded along the curb as homeowners remodeled. Windows, too, could often be found abandoned. They were sometimes scavenged by fans, more often hauled to the dump. The homes were no longer popular, so neither were their accoutrements.

Good luck snagging an abandoned May door or window today. "Now they're coveted, and they're hard to find," says Robert Burke, an elementary school principal who moved into May's Rancho Estates in Long Beach two years ago from West Hollywood. He remembers visiting a friend a decade ago and seeing doors along the road with notes attached to 'take me.'

Fortunately for Burke, some people still do let go of their doors. He found some, and installed them in his own home, replacing aluminum sliders.

Throughout the 700-home neighborhood -- built in 1953 and 1954 by developer Ross Cortese as part of the larger Lakewood development and designed by May -- people who love modern design are buying and restoring homes. The Long Beach neighborhood, distinct from adjacent tracts, is on the east side of the city, a good three-and-a-half miles from the oceanfront, near the Orange County border.

The neighborhood -- until recently underappreciated, to put it mildly -- has blossomed over the past few years as design-savvy newcomers have rediscovered May's ranch-style modernism. "Pretty much everybody who buys in the neighborhood now is coming in because they want a mid-century modern house and is doing something to build on that," says David Thompson, who bought one of the lanai models -- with an open-to-the-courtyard passageway -- six years ago and has been redoing it since.

Today, Cliff May (1908-1989) is a legendary figure. Regarded by some as the inventor of the modern ranch house, he started designing houses as a young man in San Diego. His single-story, open-plan, rambling houses, often with interior courtyards and always open to the out of doors, recalled early California ranches and came naturally to him. His mother was from an early Spanish Californian family that owned a historic adobe.

May, a building designer, never became an architect, though he was given an honorary designation of 'AIA' in his later years. His partner, Chris Choate, provided the needed license. By the 1950s, May had dropped most of the early Californian décor -- like tiles and ornate wrought-iron work -- and gone completely modern. May designed thousands of tract homes and more than 1,000 custom homes throughout the country. Rancho Estates is his largest tract.

"Fifteen years ago it was kind of the unwanted stepchild of Long Beach," says Rochelle Kramer, who handles a lot of 'Rancho' real estate with her husband Doug, and their firm, SoCal Modern. "Even realtors didn't want to deal with the Ranchos."

Today the 1,130- to 1,600-square-foot, three- and four-bedroom houses go for $650,000 to $750,000. Houses in original condition cost more than those inappropriately remodeled, Doug Kramer says. "There's a premium for the architecture." Kramer, who's lived in the neighborhood ten years, couldn't find original doors for his own home so had replicas custom made.

"It's really exciting," he says of the neighborhood's renaissance, which began about three years ago. "People are bringing them back to their modern roots or modernizing them while keeping to the original intent."

Many newcomers are in creative fields -- advertising, graphic, and product design. Robert and Nina Burgeno, whose remodeled house with the tori gate has been profiled in a book and in the press, check off their neighbors -- a Los Angeles Times reporter, a French chef, a retired food critic, architects, and landscapers. "They have a real passion and they have a real sense of design," Kramer says of the newcomers.

"There have been a couple of ratty houses that have turned really nice, even in the short time I've been here," says Thompson, who credits the Kramers' website, RanchoStyle.com, with helping spread the gospel. It wasn't the May legend that brought Thompson to the Ranchos. He had never heard of May. "Just the flow of this house is what attracted me," he says. "You move easily from inside to out. It's one continuous, entertaining living space."

"I love the light. I love the lines," Robert Burke says of his house. "They're very smartly designed."

Even more than with Eichler homes, to appreciate a May you have to get up close. Almost every home is set well back from the street and guarded by a fence. Each is different. The result is a discontinuous streetscape, with neighbors living in what Roger Russell calls a "compound." "Once you're home," Burke says, "you're sort of sequestered."

Still, people say it's a friendly neighborhood. Many meet walking dogs at nearby El Dorado Park. And many know each other already, often through their connections to the world of design. "It's a small world," says newcomer Tim Stamps.

The fences also provide privacy and add to the usable space of the house. The houses, often L-shaped, and either attached to garages and carports, or set slightly back from them, open onto courtyards through floor-to-ceiling doors. With the paired French doors opened, the houses appear more like summer pavilions, or even tents, than rigid enclosures. "We honestly feel that the square footage of the house includes the outside area," Russell says.

Board-and-batten siding provide a farmhouse-look to the post-and-beam houses. Similar siding once covered the fronts of garages, too many of which have since gotten roll-up doors. Chimneys are brick, and clerestory glass fills many gable-ends. Bedrooms generally fill one wing in an L-shaped plan, with an open living-dining area facing a central courtyard on one side and s small backyard on the other. Kitchens are galleys, and many have been opened even more to the interior through sensitive remodeling.

The houses are built on five-foot modules -- each half of the paired French doors is two-and-a-half feet wide, as are windows. "Five, five, five," Tim Stamps says, counting down the modules appreciatively. "Really simple houses. You could probably build them in a day, if you knew what you were doing, back then."

Living areas have vaulted ceilings with exposed beams for that open look. The smaller bedrooms share 'Jack-and-Jill' closets -- half the closet opening to one room, the other half to the other -- often bordered with translucent glass to provide light without compromising privacy. Exterior siding is redwood, living area interiors birch and drywall. Some ceilings are tongue-and-groove, others Celotex, a composition board. Many people have replaced the Celotex with natural wood.

The houses are not without problems. Insulation is weak. Storage is never enough. Many people add a closet or two by bumping out their bedrooms -- still keeping them beneath the eaves, however, to preserve the lines. And because of the glass, Roger and Casey Russell don't have enough wall space for their art collection. "It's a nice problem for us to have," says Roger, a marketing director at the surf and skate-wear retailer Quiksilver.

The Russells, who bought their house last year and spent five months redoing it before moving in, added insulation in the ceiling, and opened up the kitchen and created even more space by removing the washer-dryer to the garage. Like many people, they removed linoleum and polished their concrete slab till it turned silvery grey. "It can take diamond polishing like marble or terrazzo," Casey says.

"I don't find it hard on my feet yet, and we don't find it that cold -- unless it's extremely cold," Roger says.

Although the variety of fencing prevents the Ranchos from achieving a unified look, the neighborhood is surprisingly intact, Doug Kramer says. He's been talking about making Rancho Estates a historic district, noting that Long Beach already has many such districts. "Our goal is not to be restrictive but have design guidelines people can embrace," he says.

A handful of volunteers have begun to survey the area to determine whether it would qualify as a historic district. David Thompson supports the idea, with reservations. Over the years a few houses have been bulldozed, something he'd like to prevent in the future. He'd also supports re-zoning to prevent second-story additions. Linda Stamps, who moved to the Ranchos with her husband Tim in 2004, also supports historic designation. "I think it's a really important neighborhood, the architecture is beautiful, and there are not many historic older neighborhoods like this."

The Stamps moved to the Ranchos from a rented "cute bungalow" in Seal Beach, three-and-a-half miles due south, where Tim grew up and was loathe to leave. "You couldn't get me away from the beach for anything," he says.

But they wanted to buy a house and Long Beach was more affordable. They have no regrets. "It feels like you're on vacation," Linda says. "It's so open. It feels like Hawaii or Palm Springs."

Tim, who designs and builds surfboards, acknowledges that they resemble a Cliff May house. "The houses have a great, simple design that's really functional like a surfboard. There's not a lot of wasted space. It's simple utility. But it's beautiful in its simplicity."

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