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thought to be structurally unsound and thus were sacrificed to the new
design. The high water table, which gave Las Fuentes its name, had an
effect on the conversion as well.
“We had to build a steel structure to support the walls, and re-point
the stones,” said Warner. “And it was while excavating below for the golf
cart storage that we could hardly pump the water out fast enough, which
is why there is now only a half instead of a full basement.”
But the arched doorways of the ground floor’s north and south walls,
designed large enough for wagons to bring in loads of fruit, were saved.
The east and west ends of the packing house were dismantled, to allow
for wooden additions on each end that expanded the capacity of the
building. The stones, along with those from the upper two stories, were
re-used to build the gatehouse on East Valley Road and retaining walls
around the clubhouse.
On October 5, 1981, the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors
declared “Rancho Las Fuentes Lemon Packing House” to be designated
Santa Barbara County Historical Landmark No 21, and a small plaque
attesting to such was placed in one of the walls. The designation means
the first floor of the stone façade may never be demolished or removed,
at least not without a fight. What is left of the elegant packing house will
always stand in mute testimony to the landscape that has changed around
it, and the people whose stories are interwoven with its history.
(from left): James Morris, Charles Wilson, and Jack Lionel Warner, partners of the
firm Morris, Wilson & Warner Architects Inc., were engaged by the East Valley Land
Company to convert the packing house to the Birnam Wood clubhouse.
Jack Warner is the last survivor of the three, and has retired to The Sea Ranch in
northern California (photo courtesy of Jack Warner).
Oswaldo (Ozzie) Da Ros, whose expertise on stone and masonry was
integral to the conversion of the packing house to the Birnam Wood
clubhouse, makes a return visit and stands beneath the stone that dates
the building to 1892 (photo by Lynn P. Kirst).
Wood” as he watched over six hundred trees being moved onto the ranch.
Purchased from a local nursery that was going out of business, the moving
trees reminded him of the line from
Macbeth
: “Birnam wood do come to
Dunsinane.” He and local Realtor Pete Sears had already formed the East
Valley Ranch Company, with the dream of developing Las Fuentes into an
elegant residential community.
McLean and Sears hired internationally renowned landscape architect
Thomas Dolliver Church (1902-1978) to lay out the grounds, which he
did from his San Francisco office. The idea of a “village green” morphed
into fairways, for which they hired the English-born golf course architect
Robert Trent Jones (1906-2000). Like Arthur Page Brown, Jones studied
at Cornell University, and it was said, “The sun never sets on a Robert
Trent Jones golf course.” Both Church and Jones became invested by
becoming directors of the East Valley Ranch Company.
But what to do with the great packing house, with its rooftop cupolas
shaped like lemons designed by the long-gone architect Arthur Page
Brown? The hand-hewn rock walls enclosed 10,000 square feet of space
with a dirt floor, three stories in height. For McLean and Sears, the
answer was obvious: make it the center of their golf club and residential
community. For its conversion to the clubhouse, they brought in the
architectural firm of Warner, Morris & Wilson. Jack Lionel Warner, the
firm’s partner who worked on the conversion, was impressed by the high
quality of the stonework he found.
“The arches on the south and north walls aligned with each other
within a quarter of an inch,” recalled Warner in a recent conversation.
The last surviving member of his firm’s three partners, Warner was also
involved in subsequent remodels of the clubhouse.
The second and third stories, where the lemons had been “cured,” were