This postcard, postmarked July 13, 1909, was mailed from
the town of Nordhoff. By 1917, the village name had
changed to Ojai and a Mission-style stucco arcade fronted
the stores on the right, while the post office, arches,
pergola and park beautified the opposite side of the road.
Libbey proposed would be something new under
the California sun: an entire town remade in the
image of a Mission Era community.
Founded in 1874, Nordhoff had no historical
connection to the Mission Era, but that didn’t stop
Libbey. He hired San Diego architects Frank Mead
and Richard Requa, who created a Mission-style
stucco arcade to beautify the ramshackle wooden-
storefront businesses lining the north side of Ojai
Avenue. Across the street, Mead and Requa created
a park screened by a pergola flanked by Mission-
style arches, and a new post office with a Spanish
Colonial Revival bell tower 65 feet tall. Th se three
elements were in place by spring 1917, at which
point the town changed its name from Nordhoff
to Ojai. The new name was derived from the Chu-
mash word for moon and was thus a better match
for the town’s new look.
In subsequent years, Libbey added a Mission-
style church (which now houses the Ojai Valley
Museum); a new downtown hotel (today it’s called
The Oaks at Ojai); a residential development, the
Arbolada, featuring three spec houses by George
Washington Smith; and a country club with a club-
house designed by a young up-and-comer named
Wallace Neff (which has been incorporated into a
larger building at the Ojai Valley Inn).
Ojai’s makeover was widely publicized, espe-
cially in architecture magazines. In August 1918,
The Western Architect
ran a lavishly illustrated
article about Ojai’s new look, which (per the author)
had “pointed the way to civic improvement of a
more interesting type. No more charming street ex-
ists in all the state today where, yesterday, stood the
shanty town of the wild west…”
In its August 1919 issue,
The Architect and
Engineer
ran a cover story about Ojai’s inspira-
tional transformation. “Ojai’s fame as a village has
spread,” the magazine reported. “Committees of
citizens have visited it from various places in the
state, and already half a dozen small villages are
planning to do what Ojai has done.”
The town’s admiring visitors included a Mas-
sachusetts couple, Bernhard and Irene Hoffmann,
who eventually joined forces with Pearl Chase and
others to do for Santa Barbara what Libbey had
done for Ojai.
“We were impressed by two places in Califor-
nia—Ojai and Santa Barbara,” Bernhard Hoffmann
later told the Santa Barbara
News
.
A 2011 master’s thesis on Hoffmann written
for the University of Southern California School
of Architecture asserted that he was influenced by
what he saw in Ojai, especially Mead and Requa’s
Ojai Avenue arcade.
“A small-scale precursor to the larger transfor-
mation that lay ahead was demonstrated in tiny,
unincorporated Ojai,” wrote the researcher, Ellen K.
Knowles. The arcade “became an aspirational model
which Bernhard Hoffmann would soon strive to re-
alize in Santa Barbara.”
The Hoffmanns arrived in Santa Barbara in Novem-
ber 1919 and soon plunged into civic activism, join-
ing with Chase and local architects such as G.W.
Smith and James Osborne Craig to nudge people
toward embracing a unifying architectural vision for
the city. Th y focused on Casa de la Guerra as the
starting point. On September 19, 1921, Hoffmann
32
Montecito Magazine
Spring/Summer 2017
POSTCARD COURTESY JOHN FRITSCHE.