Historic Home Tour: 10am-4pm Begins at the SOHO Museum Shop at the Marston House at 3525 Seventh Avenue in the 1905 Carriage House.
Show & Sale: 10am-5pm · Outside the Marston House Antiques and new furnishings from invited vendors who cater to collectors and historic homeowners.
Silent Auction: 10am-3pm · Outside the Marston House Proceeds from this one-day Tour, Sale and Auction will benefit SOHO's advocacy and preservation work.
About the Tour: This is a rare opportunity to tour five private historic homes on San Diego's Seventh Avenue. The fabled homes, designed and built for prominent citizens between 1904 and 1913, form one of Southern California's architecturally significant enclaves. Bordering on Balboa Park, the houses are the work of four of San Diego's most acclaimed architects: Irving J. Gill, William Hebbard, Frank Mead and Richard Requa. Representative of the Arts and Crafts movement, these homes are the result of Gill's experimental early modernism and Mead's fascination with the indigenous architecture of the American Southwest and North Africa.
Advance Tickets:
$25 SOHO Members
$30 Non-members
Purchase Advance Tickets:
Call SOHO (619) 297-9327 or (619) 297-7511. In person SOHO Museum Shop, 2476 San Diego Avenue. $35 Day of the tour - All tickets
About the Architects:
Hebbard and Gill, San Diego's most prestigious architecture firm in the early 20th century, designed several of the residences that will be open to tour goers, beginning with the 1905 Arts and Crafts-style mansion for George White Marston, a visionary civic leader, philanthropist and early conservationist and historic preservationist.
During a drawn-out construction period due to Gill's work on the east coast, the architect persuaded the Marstons to eliminate non-structural half-timbering from the exterior. This change from a design rooted in the English Arts and Crafts tradition thrust the house into modernity, as did interior design innovations.
Also in 1905, Alice Lee, a socially prominent developer, hired Hebbard and Gill to design three homes arranged around a common central garden. She and her companion, Katherine Teats, shared the center house, which will be open for the tour, where they entertained President and Mrs. Teddy Roosevelt and Mrs. Grover Cleveland. They rented out the side cottages, which were joined to the main house by a U-shaped pergola. Architectural historian Thomas S. Hines has written that these horizontal, hip-roofed structures represent "the best of Gill's California improvisations on [Frank Lloyd] Wright's Prairie themes."
Marston sold land directly north of the Marston House to his sister and brother-in-law, Lilla and Frederick Burnham, another civic leader who was a harbor commissioner in 1906. They also hired Hebbard and Gill, with Gill as the lead designer, to design a large, boxy red brick house that broke with the English Arts and Crafts cottage style in favor of the more modern streamlined style of its neighbor, the Marston house.
Mead and Requa designed a stripped-down, geometric home inspired by Pueblo architecture for Lorenze and Miriam Barney in 1913. It stands next to the house Lorenze's parents had commissioned two years earlier from Pacific Building Company, a San Diego design and construction firm staffed by Gill's former draftsmen.
Save Our Heritage Organisation is a 501 (c)3 non-profit organization.