Casa del Herrero

The Casa del Herrero stands in Montecito, just east of Santa Barbara, and is one of the most fully preserved Spanish Colonial Revival country estates in the United States. The house was designed by the Pasadena architect George Washington Smith and completed in 1925 for George Fox Steedman, an industrialist and amateur metalworker whose interest in Spanish craftsmanship gave the residence its name, the House of the Blacksmith. Steedman commissioned a building that would draw directly on the Andalusian farmhouses and small Spanish country houses he and his wife Carrie had studied during travel abroad.

The Casa is a stucco-faced, wood-framed building rendered in the visual language of adobe, with thick wall masses, deep window reveals, low-pitched tile roofs, hand-wrought iron grilles, carved doors, and a series of intimate patios linking principal rooms to the gardens. Smith's design integrates the house tightly with grounds laid out by Ralph Stevens, Lockwood de Forest Jr., and Francis T. Underhill, producing a sequence of formal terraces, tiled fountains, citrus groves, and Moorish-inflected garden rooms that are considered among the finest of their period in California. Steedman's own forge work, displayed throughout the property, contributes locks, hinges, and lighting fixtures of unusual craftsmanship.

The estate has remained substantially intact, with original furnishings, library, gardens, and outbuildings preserved by the family through the 20th century. The Casa del Herrero Foundation, established in the 1990s, opened the property for guided tours and assumed long-term stewardship. The site is designated a National Historic Landmark in recognition of its national-level importance in Spanish Colonial Revival architecture and garden design.

The Casa del Herrero operates today as a privately stewarded house museum open to the public by appointment. Within California's broader adobe and Hispanic Revival tradition, the Casa del Herrero represents the high point of the 1920s estate phase, in which the missions and ranchos provided the formal vocabulary for fully realized country houses on the Santa Barbara coast.