Cliff May’s advanced ranch home designs give him a place of honour in the home hall of fame. He introduced comfort and convenience into postwar ’50s houses, from motorized skylights and bath vanity cabinets to single-lever taps and whole-house intercoms. He included features of big, custom ranches to more small and inexpensive ranch houses, and gave them a sense of spaciousness as well as strong connections between inside and outside.
May’s work integrated environmental design before it had been known as such, states Dan Gregory, writer of Cliff May and the Modern Ranch House. Careful consideration of sun angles, wind directions, vegetation and much more went into his layouts — concepts that many today appear to be just revisiting.
May’s pioneering designs are celebrated in a new exhibition, Carefree California: Cliff May and the Romance of the Ranch House, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, through June 17, 2012.
Catherine Opie
Cliff May introduced a continuous, motorized skylight to the fourth home he built for himself. Even the skylight, that runs the full length of the roof ridge, provides ample lighting to the interior spaces and, if open, attracts the night sky and stars indoors. Appears to me that children raised in such a house would naturally become astrophysicists.
Catherine Opie
May built five houses for himself and used each as a lab to explore thoughts and tinker with gadgets. He , of course, used these homes. Actually, May’s wife never knew when a visitor was anticipated to stop by, so the home had to constantly be in tiptop shape (that was the 1950s, after all). The fourth house was 1,600 square feet.
Besides the skylight, May’s innovations in this house included movable walls which allowed the room to be reconfigured at will. May along with his architect partner, Chris Choate, made 6-foot-high cabinets on casters that may be moved around to form the desired spaces.
Catherine Opie
A shallow-pitched gable roof creates a spacious and comfortable living room, while the ceiling and walls make for a luminous interior.
A lot of those 950- to 1,200-square-foot ranches May built at Lakewood Rancho Estates have been revived and brought up to current codes so that they can be appreciated by a new generation of residents.
Catherine Opie
Interior walls of glass, yet another of May’s innovations, allow light to travel from room to room. And that gorgeous, dark concrete floor forms a foundation and lends a sheen, letting the light to bounce around more.
UC Regents
The origins of May’s design strategy can be seen in this sketch to get a small home. In the easy plan, organized around an interior courtyard space, just about every single room has a link to the outside — perfect for its mild California climate.
May’s ranch houses used the colonial Spanish tradition of covered passageways, or corredores, to connect rooms and blur boundaries between the inside and outside.
UC Regents
This sketch shows all of the components of a Cliff May ranch:
The courtyard enables each room to get access to your private outside space.
The low-pitched gable roofs rest lightly on the walls.
The porte-cochere entrance recognizes the significance of the car.The low garden walls define outdoor living spaces for rooms which may not have access to the courtyard.
UC Regents
Cliff May’s floor programs are real lessons in design, even though he had been self-taught rather than a trained architect. The open preparation, union of interior and outside spaces and movement throughout the home are orchestrated with fantastic skill. It’s like Frank Lloyd Wright or Mies van der Rohe had relocated to Southern California and become relaxed and laid back in the procedure.
UC Regents
May was a master promoter and marketer of his projects, and he had been in the right place at the right time with the right idea. This was article–World War II America. Land was cheap, gas was cheap and owning a home was central to the American dream.
UC Regents
In places like Sullivan Canyon Ranches and Lakewood Rancho Estates, May introduced the cheap ranch and perfect of homeownership to the masses.
UC Regents
The House That Dreams Constructed: Mock-Up for Cliff May Homes Brochure (circa 1954)
Affordable and easily financed, Cliff May ranches embodied the conveniences and lifestyle the expanding middle class yearned for.
From small and economical to big, sprawling and tradition, the two ends of the architectural spectrum were handled by May. His capacity to answer the site and make a home both comfortable and livable, whether small or lavish, is what makes his job relevant for us today.
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