Some Additional Observations on California's Monterey Tradition
Between the years 1834 and 1850, California experienced the construction of a group of two-story porched or cantilevered balcony adobes, which eventually came to be labeled as the Monterey style. The first cluster of these Monterey adobes was built in the mid-1830s. The earliest of these, by a matter of months, was the Alpheus B. Thompson adobe (1834-1836) in Santa Barbara. Others, including the often-discussed Thomas Oliver Larkin adobe (1834-1837), were scattered throughout much of the length of coastal California. These California Monterey style adobes not only represent a commingling of Hispanic and Anglo architectural traditions, but their specific porched and balconied forms were clearly related to English, French, Spanish, and American two-story dwellings built in the Caribbean area, in the American Southeast, in the lower Mississippi Delta, and in the American Southwest of Texas and New Mexico.