In traditional Santa Barbara, his whimsical, storybook buildings beg you to stop and stare
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Walking through downtown Santa Barbara, it’s impossible to not turn your head when you see it: those marshmallow-like plaster walls, wiggly wrought ironwork and tile that looks as though it belongs in a palace you’d stumble upon in a storybook.
This is the effect architect Jeff Shelton’s signature design has on viewers: the ability to pluck you out of the monotony of the day, if only briefly.
When asked why he thinks this is so, Shelton is quick to point to the tried-and-true architectural methods of the past, which he proudly uses. Buildings, he said, had to be designed “to act more independently” in serving the needs of their specific inhabitants. A window’s primary purpose, for example, was to allow the ideal amount of light to enter.
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“So therefore they had taller windows,” he said, sitting opposite me in his Fig Avenue office in downtown Santa Barbara, surrounded by endless sketches and pattern mock-ups.
Shelton obsesses over other design details that are often overlooked in modern architecture yet instinctively felt when you encounter them: high ceilings, for one (his are 14 to 18 feet from the ground floor), as well as smaller touches like ironwork, stonework and glass. Crucially, all are made by people, designed by people — “nothing,” he said, “out of the catalog.”
Before going solo, Shelton spent a decade working in downtown Los Angeles with architect Brenda Levin on projects including the Bradbury Building and Grand Central Market. He then returned to his hometown of Santa Barbara, where he has designed 90 buildings since 1994, many of them within Santa Barbara’s Historic Landmarks District, commonly referred to as El Pueblo Viejo.
Following Santa Barbara’s 1925 earthquake, which destroyed much of downtown, new construction in the area was required to adopt the Spanish Revival style, which, according to the city’s website, “is key to the identity and beauty of Santa Barbara.” New buildings in the district must draw inspiration from Andalusia and Southern Spain and incorporate elements such as tile, terra-cotta, plaster and ironwork.
For Shelton, the guidelines are merely a reference. When designing, he doesn’t “try to make it like Spain at all,” he said, rather matter-of-factly. “I try to just use the materials and proportions and the craft of what’s so great about being in Spain.”
That approach shines through in his many projects near his Fig Street office, a 10-block radius Shelton has dubbed the “Fig District,” where 10 of his most lauded projects lie, inadvertently creating a kind of architectural museum in the heart of downtown.
Seeing them requires little more than a two-hour self-guided tour, carving your own path or following the map on Shelton’s website. By the end of the excursion, you, too, may ask yourself the same question I did: Why did we ever stop building this way?
Shelton didn’t have an answer. He could only promise to never stop.
“Every building I do is my last building,” said Shelton, now 68. “If I die tomorrow, at least I put everything in this last building.”
Without further ado, here are designs by Shelton all located in the Fig District, including iron gates designed by his brother, David.
State Street Undercrossing
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He understood that, especially at night, it felt threatening and uninviting, particularly for women. His own daughters told him, “We don’t walk there.”
Because Caltrans wouldn’t allow him to alter the bridge, his first priority was to widen the pedestrian path and open sight lines by narrowing the columns. He then clothed the concrete columns in colorful tile, each with a unique pattern, brightening the space.
He recognized that lighting was perhaps the most crucial element, and that the previous “prison-like” bulbs were not cutting it. Instead, he created large egg-like lamps that line the walkway, acting as guides for the undercrossing traveler. To tie it all together, he added flower cutouts to the iron railing, which cast shadows in the sun.
The goal here was simple: “To make it a little more delightful,” he said.
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Pistachio House
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Because the building was historically significant, Shelton couldn’t do much in the way of redesign. Still, he managed to add the subtle quirks that make a Shelton building unmistakably his, including suspended tile rugs, made to appear as if they “had just been washed and hung to dry,” as Shelton wrote in his book “The Fig District: Some Buildings in Downtown Santa Barbara.”
A couple that Shelton was working with, Gail and Gena Zannon, owned the Santa Barbara Pistachio Co., so he ran with a pistachio theme, even bringing in a pistachio fountain by stonemason Andy Johnson with “an erotic glowing soapstone,” Shelton wrote.
Those quirky, whimsical details draw the viewer in. From the outside looking in, Shelton said, “You know, you can imagine yourself up in one of those rooms.”
Ablitt Tower
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At just 20 by 20 square feet, the formerly two-car parking spot “was supposedly unbuildable,” Shelton said. For this reason, he almost passed on the project, but true to Shelton form, the challenge intrigued him.
“I said, ‘Don’t pay me till I get a permit,’” he told owners Neil and Sue Ablitt, “because I think this might be kind of hard to do.”
At the time, Shelton was at the height of a one-sided feud with a fellow architect who, according to Shelton, had a penchant for chucking dead rats onto his job sites. The Ablitt Tower lot was filled with many of those rodents.
Despite it all, the project was approved three years after he was approached with the idea. Within 689 square feet, spread across four stories reaching 53 feet, Shelton managed to fit a kitchen, bedroom, living space and roof area. The building’s exterior is crafted in his recognizable white plaster and includes a blue-and-white striped tile archway above the garage.
Shelton was awarded creative freedom from the owners on the entire project, except for one detail: “All they wanted was a blue stove.”
And a blue stove they got.
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El Andaluz
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Step inside and glance up at the intricate artwork covering the ceiling. If you look close enough, you may see a few slithering creatures. The story behind them is that Shelton was looking for a design that filled the small spaces between the paneled walls. He landed on snakes.
“Most of the stuff and imagery I do, I don’t stop and think,” he said. “I go.”
However, he ran into a problem: Potential buyers said they didn’t want snakes “because of the symbolism.” So Shelton went back up on the scaffold and put feet on them.
“I just turned them into salamanders, and everyone was happy.”
Vera Cruz
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This project goes back to 2011, when Shelton’s friend Jason Yardi asked if he would like to design a building on a vacant lot he had recently purchased. Seeing as the lot was outside of the historic district, Shelton saw an opportunity to challenge himself, to do something he had never done before.
He remembered a fellow named Sanford Darling, whose house on Santa Barbara’s West Side was called the “House of 1000 Paintings.” Shelton wanted to do something similar.
Once the city approved the project on the grounds that no paintings be political or crass, Shelton instructed artists “to paint a memory” and they went to work on their panels.
Shelton describes the result as a kind of standalone gallery. “Each painting has a story of each person’s life,” he said.
El Zapato
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“And I said, ‘You can’t get that,’” he told her, “but I can look at your lot and see what you can get.”
The answer, it turns out, was a shoe.
One of the project’s primary goals was to save the pink flame tree out front, so Shelton essentially designed the building around it — resulting in its quirky shape and fitting name.
“It looks like a shoe, so I call it El Zapato,” Shelton joked.
Standing in front of the building, one’s eye settles on the massive teal-trimmed window, a nod to Shelton’s subtle but intentional approach to bringing light to the forefront. Everything, he said, is “about light.”
Equally eye-catching are details like the hard-to-miss balcony, with an iron railing that looks as though it was dipped in purple paint and hasn’t dried yet. The same purple ironwork appears in small details throughout the building.
Trying to determine just what kind of shoe it is, I landed on a high-top Converse — which, according to Shelton’s book, is the exact shoe Lejade “wears every day.”
Cota Street Studios
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He did the code research, as he always does, and discovered there wasn’t any rule against putting plates on a wall. He told the board that he had seen similar designs in Spain.
“I hadn’t actually,” Shelton confessed to me, though the next year he went to Spain and saw a few plates on a building.
His first design placed the plates on the front of Cota Street Studios, but the review board pushed back and asked him to move them to the back. When he drew the sketch, he was unsure how or where he’d get the plates, but he knew he’d figure it out later.
“If you try to solve all your problems first,” Shelton said, “you are not going to get anything done.”
Shelton sought the help of Linda Hail Godlis, a friend and local ceramicist, to construct and paint the plates. A couple of months later, she produced 200 of them.
Community Arts Workshop C.A.W. Gates by David Shelton
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There are two main gates: The Ortega Street gates are inspired by Chumash winter solstice traditions, while the Garden Street gates focus on the summer solstice and Greek mythology.
To design them, David said he researched constellations including Corvus (the crow), Cancer, Capricorn, Hydra and Taurus, as well as scientific details about ellipses, the Earth’s tilt and the sun’s position at the solstices.
The gates are aligned so the sun activates each side at a precise moment of the year: On the winter solstice, sunlight illuminates a glass element at the Ortega Street gate, and on the summer solstice, it passes through a tube and lights a glass piece by glassblower Saul Alcaraz set into an Earth-shaped disk at the Garden Street gate.
El Jardin
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Working with the feng shui expert the owner had flown in from Seattle, Shelton implemented every feng shui requirement, using them as creative constraints that forced him to rethink the entries, circulation and outdoor space. In the end, the constraints gave the building more light and a less conventional layout.
The star of the show, however, is the clock with numbers that look like they’re melting. Seeing that the building’s first owner was a luxury travel agent, Shelton wanted to include a clock, like the ones you find in old travel offices. But what time zone should it be set to?
“I’m thinking, well, wait a second, what time is it in Paris,” asked Shelton, “and what time is it here, and what time is it [in] Thailand? So I just put numbers everywhere because it’s different times everywhere.”
Augie’s of Santa Barbara
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He felt, however, that he could transform it. First, by knocking down the solid wall and creating two large blue-and-white-striped arches, opening up views and drawing people toward the corner rather than away from it. He then topped the building with sculptural elements — originally eggs that the city “didn’t want,” so he replaced them with spheres. The structure essentially becomes a work of art against the sky.
As Shelton said, “The skyline is always most important to me.”
