The name sounds like a Spanish land grant. It came off a subdivision map.
The Santa Fe Land Improvement Company, the real estate arm of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, renamed the place Rancho Santa Fe in 1921. It already had a name. It had carried it for most of a century. Rancho San Dieguito. The railroad retired that one and put its own on the property it was trying to sell.
That is not even the good part.
Two things worth staying for. Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford built here. And the board that decides what you can build in Rancho Santa Fe today has not changed its standard since 1928.
The land was a Mexican grant, and the man who got it was San Diego's first alcalde.
Juan Maria Osuna was on the property from 1836. Provisional grants in 1840 and 1841, absolute title in 1845 from Governor Pio Pico. The grant ran 8,824 acres. His heirs got it patented in 1871, once the American courts had finished deciding which Mexican titles they felt like honoring.
You will see 1836, 1840, 1841 and 1845 printed as the founding date depending on which document somebody was holding. Osuna was there from 1836 and held clear title from 1845. California's own landmark record calls it a grant of nearly 9,000 acres made to Osuna in 1845.
By the early 1900s the Santa Fe was laying track faster than it could buy timber. So it went looking for a crop it could grow itself.
Eucalyptus looked perfect. Grows fast. Grows in bad soil. Grows in Southern California. In 1906 the railroad planted what its own successor organization describes as hundreds of thousands of eucalyptus trees on the old Osuna land, specifically to make ties.
Ten years of growing. Hundreds of thousands of trees.
Then somebody drove a spike into one.
That is the whole problem. The wood is hard, and it is hard in the wrong way. Hammer a railroad spike into a eucalyptus tie and the tie splits. A tie that splits at the spike is not a tie.
The Santa Fe quit the timber operation in 1916, sitting on thousands of acres of trees it had grown for exactly one purpose and could not use for that purpose.
Worth noting the trees did not stop. A 1928 trade journal describes eucalyptus still being irrigated and forest planted privately on an estate here. What ended in 1916 was the railroad's commercial venture, not the eucalyptus.
So now a railroad owns a forest in northern San Diego County and has no idea what to do with it.
The railroad set up the Santa Fe Land Improvement Company and started planning a rural residential community, aimed at what the period politely called gentleman farmers. People with money made somewhere else who wanted acreage, citrus, horses and a view.
The people who pulled this off are named in the record. Writing in 1928, the project's own architect described a large corporation with immense resources that wanted a permanent horticultural development on an old Spanish grant of some 9,000 acres. L. G. Sinnard got the job of making it happen. W. E. Hodges, a vice president of the railroad, gave him what she called carte blanche to do as he willed. Sinnard hired the architecture firm Requa and Jackson because he liked their work at Ojai.
Renamed in 1921. Land sold through the twenties. Governance handed to a nonprofit, the Rancho Santa Fe Association, formed in 1927, with the city planner Charles H. Cheney brought in to write the Covenant over the following year. In July 1928 the trade press found owners still mid-project, organizing to make permanent the building rules the land company had been enforcing on its own.
Two things there are worth sitting with. This community was designed as a product, by a corporation, to fix a balance sheet. And the buyer it was built for is close enough to the buyer it still attracts that the pitch has needed almost no revision in a hundred years.
Requa and Jackson took the commission and assigned it to an architect the Rancho Santa Fe Association's own history calls little known at the time.
Lilian Rice was born in National City in 1888. One of the first women to study architecture at Berkeley, class of 1910. The roster of the California State Board of Architectural Examiners has her as the tenth woman licensed in the state, at a point when over 1,650 men held licenses. California's landmark record calls her one of the state's first successful women architects.
She was not modest about what happened next, and she had no reason to be. From The Architect and Engineer, July 1928:
It became my privilege to work out the details of design on the ground at Rancho Santa Fe and in time the entire responsibility was thrown upon my shoulders.
The entire responsibility. She was in her thirties.
And on what the place asked of her:
With the thought early implanted in my mind that true beauty lies in simplicity rather than in ornateness, I found real joy at Rancho Santa Fe.
She did not design a building here. She designed the village. The commercial core, the street pattern, how the buildings sit against the hills behind them. Every Spanish Colonial Revival house built in the Covenant since is answering to her.
The Inn is the clearest thing left of that work, and the clearest evidence of what this place was actually for. Built 1922 to 1923 as a guest house, so the land company had somewhere to park prospects overnight while it sold them acreage. Period credit goes to Requa and Jackson as the firm, with Rice as supervising architect on the ground. Guest house, then community clubhouse, then the Inn. Still open at 5951 Linea del Cielo, on a low hill looking straight down Paseo Delicias.
La Valenciana went up at Paseo Delicias and La Granada in 1928 and took an American Institute of Architects Honor Award in 1933 as a mixed use office and apartment building.
Her work went past the village. In August 1928 The Architect and Engineer credited Rice on the Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford estate at Rancho Santa Fe, running a photograph of the pump house she supervised there.
In 1928 Fairbanks and Pickford were the two most famous people alive. They were building in the eucalyptus.
Most people who live here have never seen how much of this is on file.
The village is California Historical Landmark 982, registered February 17, 1989, plaque on the Village Green in front of the Inn.
The whole planned community got surveyed by the Historic American Buildings Survey as HABS CA-2315. The file at the Library of Congress holds nine photographs, a measured drawing and forty two pages of written data.
The Terwilliger House at 5880 San Elijo, built 1925, is separately on the National Register, reference 91000945, listed August 5, 1991, Rice as architect of record. There is also a National Register multiple property nomination covering Lilian Rice designed buildings here, which is the best single document on her work anywhere.
The Covenant's Art Jury was set up in 1928 and Rice sat on it from the start.
She fell ill at her Rancho Santa Fe home in December 1938, had emergency surgery, and died the next day. She was fifty.
The Art Jury still approves every construction plan inside the Covenant. Buy here today, decide you want to change a roofline, and your drawings go to a design review board that has been applying the same architectural standard since 1928, set by an architect who has been dead since 1938.
The history here is not decoration on the price. Three things set in the 1920s still drive what trades here.
The parcels are big because the original product was acreage for gentleman farmers, not lots for houses. That is why supply runs high and days on market run long. There are not many of them, and each one is a separate decision by a small pool of buyers.
The Art Jury limits what you can build. That protects the character the price depends on, and it also means a renovation timeline in the Covenant is not a normal San Diego renovation timeline. Price that in before you buy.
And the eucalyptus is a bill. Those trees went in as a crop in 1906, not as landscaping, and mature eucalyptus drops limbs. Ask about it on any property that has them.
See the current numbers on the Rancho Santa Fe market report, updated monthly from closed MLS sales, or the wider North County Coastal picture.
- California Office of Historic Preservation, California Historical Landmark 982, Historic Planned Community of Rancho Santa Fe, registered February 17, 1989. ohp.parks.ca.gov/ListedResources/Detail/982
- Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey, Rancho Santa Fe, HABS CA-2315. loc.gov/item/ca1694
- National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places, Terwilliger, Claude and Florence, House, reference 91000945, listed August 5, 1991.
- National Register of Historic Places, multiple property nomination, Lilian Rice Designed Buildings in Rancho Santa Fe.
- Lilian J. Rice, in The Architect and Engineer of California, volume 93, July 1928, and the August 1928 issue.
- Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation, Pioneering Women of American Architecture, Lilian J. Rice.
- Rancho Santa Fe Association, community history.
- Rancho Santa Fe Historical Society.
- San Diego History Center, The Silver Dons.
- Market Journal IQ, Rancho Santa Fe market report, updated monthly.
Two contested points, stated rather than buried Her birth year is 1888 in the National Register nomination and per the Rancho Santa Fe Historical Society, and 1889 in several other reference works. This follows the two sources closest to her. The eucalyptus count of hundreds of thousands is the Association's own figure. California's landmark text says only thousands, and no independent count exists.
Stories from around San Diego County, one place at a time.