Architectural Drawings

June 15, 2005

Today I have confirmed that the architectural plans for our house are on file at the Architecture and Design Collection in the University Art Museum at the University of California at Santa Barbara.  Collection curator Kurt Helfrich informed me:

I have checked our inventory of Irving Gill drawings and there are 10
architectural plans for the Williams House.

Full size xeroxes on vellum of each of the drawings will be $33.00, so the
total would be $330.00 plus a $5.00 shipping fee --so a total of $335.00.

If you are interested in obtaining copies please let me know a fax number
that I can send you a copy of our researcher application form which you
will need to complete and return to us with a copy of the title deed to
your property--showing proof of ownership.

We are very excited that original plans for this house are available.  We are not sure that we need all 10 drawings so we thought that it may be time for a fieldtrip to check the drawings out before committing $335.00.  Of course, we want all of the elevation drawings, floor plan drawings, and any window details. 

We expect that most of the floor plan in this house is original, though there are two bedrooms with closets that may have been added.  None of the other bedrooms have closets.  We know that the porch rooms were enclosed, but we are not sure if these porches were screened.  The house was a summer house and we have a fairly large mosquito population here in the summer.  It makes sense that it was screened.  Older photos of the house show the porches unscreened but we are not clear if these photos show the finished house. 

One mystery the plans will solve is how the flat roofs drained just above our eastern and western porches.  Both roofs are accessible from the inside balcony on the second floor so they were obviously planned to be sitting areas of some sort.  Each also had a low wall, shingled, built across the front in lieu of a railing.  Those walls have been removed and the roofs drain where those walls once stood.  Clearly, there was a different drainage plan.  That plan could help us with current drainage problems: water does not drain well off of our west side flat roof and in runs down the porch room wall.  In the old days, that wall did not exist, but in the old days, the roof drained entirely differently anyway.

I would also like to see some detail on our kitchen’s cool room which is now my office.  We have speculated that there was no north wall in this room, however, the exterior shingles show no evidence.  It is unlikely that previous owners took such care in adding this wall that they worked at getting the shingles to look right (in other areas they did not).  So while it is possible there was no wall, I am skeptical.