Judging Spanish Colonial Style by its main title alone, it would be easy to mistake this handsome collaboration between Rizzoli and the Santa Barbara Historical Museum for another coffee-table book with pictures of beautiful houses. As pleasurable as those can be, the rest of the title — Santa Barbara and the Architecture of James Osborne Craig and Mary McLaughlin Craig — describes something quite different and even more valuable, at least to those who wish to understand and appreciate the distinctive history of our beautiful city. Thanks to co-authors Pamela Skewes-Cox and Robert Sweeney, Spanish Colonial Style provides a significantly new appreciation of the golden age of Santa Barbara architecture, an enthralling account of a tragically short married partnership, and the fascinating story of the determined woman who survived it.
How many times have I sat in the elegant Mary Craig Auditorium at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art without giving a second thought to the woman after whom the venue is named? It won’t happen again, not after this wild ride through the life and times of the young girl from Deadwood who grew up to become one of the area’s most influential and highly regarded architects. Without the tragic death of her husband when he was just 33 years old, it’s unlikely that Mary McLaughlin Craig would have ever considered running her own firm. But when forced by circumstances to discover a way to support herself and her young daughter, Craig became a major driver throughout Santa Barbara architecture’s period of greatest creative ferment.
Reared by a tough company lawyer in one of the West’s most notorious mining towns, Mary McLaughlin acquired a broad humanistic education thanks to the Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School in Washington, D.C. She met James Osborne Craig, a recent immigrant from Scotland and a talented draftsman, when they were both idealistic youths. He declared his love early on and pursued Mary McLaughlin through a thicket of other suitors, most of them Ivy League swells from Montecito or Pasadena.