ABSTRACT
Today, the University of California Berkeley–trained architect Lutah Maria Riggs (1896–1984) is mostly acknowledged as a supreme designer of revival-style buildings in Santa Barbara and Southern California. Constant in Riggs’s long professional life, however, was not an architectural style but individual clients and single-family and detached houses. Many, if not most, of Riggs’s clients could afford to commission individually designed houses, and they understood the design of such homes as an extension of the personality of the owner.
Following a brief biographical overview of the life and career of Riggs, this chapter focuses on examples of her domestic architecture, mostly in the Santa Barbara area and broadly spanning the 1930s to the 1970s. Riggs’s architectural career rested on a close symbiosis between the architect, her clients, and the regional setting, which ensured the local and regional success of her architecture but also contributed to Riggs’s relative obscurity in contemporary architectural history.
