Beatrice Magee

Beatrice married Charles Clifford May. Charles was born 2 Nov 1881, San Diego, San Diego, California, United States; died 16 Jul 1959, San Diego, San Diego, California, United States. [Group Sheet]

Other Events:

• Residence: 1910, San Diego Ward 2, San Diego, San Diego, California, United States
• Residence: 1910, Los Angeles Assembly District 70, , Los Angeles, California
• Residence: 1920, San Diego, San Diego, California, United States
• Residence: 1930, San Diego, San Diego, California, United States
• Residence: 1930, San Diego, San Diego, California, United States

Notes:

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Cliff May (1909-1989) was an architect practicing in California best known and remembered for developing the suburban Post-war "dream home" — the California Ranch House.

Clifford Magee May was born to Beatrice Magee and Charles Clifford May on August 29, 1908 in San Diego. Always proud of his family background, May was a sixth-generation Californian through his mother's family, a descendent of José María Estudillo. A Spanish soldier, Estudillo rose through the ranks from a lieutenant in charge of Monterey for over twenty years to captain overseeing San Diego in 1827. When Estudillo took command of San Diego, his son José Antonio was granted a lot in the newly surveyed lands outside the presidio walls and it is here the family settled down and built an adobe house that overlooked the plaza.

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Cliff May
October 30, 1989
OK, California, drop those barbecue aprons to half-mast and pause a moment in memory of Cliff May (Obituaries, Oct. 20).

Here was a man who made practical applications of the American spirit of the times after WWII.

I lived in a Cliff May-inspired house in Long Beach and, except for a Wilson's infielder's glove I used during the summers of 1958-1962, it was the most elegantly form-fitting piece of construction I have ever occupied.


May's designs recognized and anticipated the middle-class social contour in post-war California: the need for cheap housing for the returning GIs; lots of space to expand for the growing families; removal of the public front porch to the private back yard--sans garage, of course; open, flowing space within the houses to accommodate the interactions of family life.

Since May there have been others who have interpreted the changing zeitgeist , notably the designers of all those apartment buildings with the underground garage and just enough height to avoid the terrible expense of high-rise building codes. In their own way, they are as important as May.

But how mean-spirited and glum are these buildings compared to the glowing optimism of May's bourgeois charmers. What a lucky man he was to have designed the architectural equivalent of hope.

JOHN LEVERENCE

Burbank

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One of the houses designed by Cliff May was featured on the TV show Flip or Flop.

https://lbcliffmayrancho.wordpress.com/2014/08/04/cliff-may-featured-on-flip-or-flop/

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THE MAN BEHIND THE RANCH HOUSE

By JOSEPH GIOVANNINI

Published: July 3, 1986

THE ranch house in America was so popular after World War II that, in retrospect, it seems to have been a grass roots development. But architectural historians trace its invention to a single architect - and he is alive, well and living in his own sprawling ranch house in California.

''Everyone tells me I invented it; it's been said so many times but I still don't believe it,'' says the 77-year-old Clifford May speaking in perhaps his ultimate ranch house, all 10,000 square feet of it, in a canyon of the Santa Monica mountains. ''But I guess we were there first.'' ''First'' was 1931, when Mr. May - who never attended architecture school, but had designed furniture - built a one-story, tile-roofed courtyard house on speculation in San Diego, inspired by his family's own adobe ranch houses in the area. His aunt had lived in the adobe house on the old Los Flores rancho, and his great-great-great-grandfather Miguel Estudillo had lived in the San Diego house where Helen Hunt Jackson, author of the romantic early California novel ''Ramona''set Ramona's wedding.

''I rebelled against the boxy houses being built then,'' says the architect, who still practices. ''The ranch house was everything a California house should be -it had cross-ventilation, the floor was level with the ground, and with its courtyard and the exterior corridor, it was about sunshine and informal outdoor living.''

The first house sold easily, for $9,500 despite the Depression, and Mr. May repeated his success, doing over 50 other houses in San Diego. By the mid-1930's, Mr. May was offering, as a developer-architect, a choice between old ranch houses based on native California adobe models, and what he calls a Yankee version. Both had the same plan but the Yankee house was surfaced in board and batten: shingles rather than tiles were used for roofing. In 1935, he moved to Los Angeles, where over the decades he has designed more than a thousand custom houses, some situated as far as Australia, Ireland and Switzerland.

He also sold plans for about 18,000 ranch houses and designed ranch-house tracts, some of which he developed himself.

With bedroom wings stretching into yards, and courtyards and patios mingling with interior spaces, the ranch house proved a comfortable, likable, adaptable and enormously popular family house, one that also offered a life style.

Already imitated by the mid-1930's, the ranch house went on to conquer many American suburbs with its charm and simplicity, and, especially during the 1950's, encouraged the country's informal backyard way of life. There were many variations of Mr. May's California ranch house across the country; contractors simplified it in the 1960's into a more modern-style structure that kept the long, low lines and outdoor orientation.

Unlike most suburban ranch houses today, Mr. May's comes with the ranch. Electric gates about 10 feet high and 20 feet wide noiselessly part at the foot of his 15-acre West Los Angeles estate, to reveal split-rail fences and long rolling meadows spotted with sheep and horses grazing among California sycamores and native live oaks. A low gatehouse, with a manger next to the corral, has sycamore trees growing up through the heavy, hand-split shake roof. The bell that can be heard ringing up the canyon, at the main house, once used to call farmhands to work at his aunt's.

A visitor enters the front door of the main house to the soft beat of Big Band music, piped through a sound system that reaches every indoor and outdoor space of the sprawling house.

An amateur musician, Mr. May played the saxophone in the Cliff May Orchestra from 1924 to 1932. He owns a large collection of tapes and records.

When he is not playing Big Band recordings, the architect accompanies a baby-grand player piano in the living room on a second baby grand next to the first. Both instruments have had their legs shortened, to parallel the horizontal lines so consistently used in the house. The only tall shape in the house is the pigeon tower, home for white roller pigeons, which, when they fly, sometimes abruptly roll.

Built in 1953, what was first a 12-room, 6,500-square-foot house was expanded many times. The children's bedrooms were doubled and a separate dining area and a library were built; bathrooms were improved. Always, the rooms kept their close relationship to the patios. What was originally a raw canyon landscape evolved into a gentle, pastoral setting: California poppies coat the bank of a hill and white iris border the meadow, The house's board and batten siding, its hand-troweled masonry, the antique doors and decorative wrought-iron give a rustic and romantic look to the picturesquely composed building, but its feeling is modern, with the easy flow of the space inside, the brightness and its openness to the outside.

''A house doesn't have to look modern to be modern,'' says the architect, ''and a modern-looking house isn't necessarily modern.'' The 55-foot-long living room, with a sheltering roof 14 feet high, has a surprising continuous skylight at the peak, which opens the room to the sky, silhouetting the beams. The long room leads the eye straight out through the plate glass windows to the bucolic south and north meadows. The volume of space inside is huge. Mr. May has chosen low furnishings, to keep the space intact. An entire side of the living room is lined leather and vellum bound books; there are groupings of pre-Columbian statues, gathered during Mr. Clay's many flights to Mexico (he is a pilot). The living room has country-style walk-in fireplace.

The easygoing house is, however, only apparently simple: Mr. May, an engineer by instinct, has planted the house and grounds so that they are a land mine of gadgets. The sprinkler system is automatic, and Mr. May knows where every valve is.

There are motion sensors throughout the house; copper pipes heat the patio paving. In the corral, there is an electric horse ''hot-walker,'' to keep the horses exercised; an electric flytrap, set over the compost heap, immolates passing flies. Even the layers of wood shingles in the roof are separated by sheets of metal, to protect the house in case of a canyon fire.

Recently the architect installed a fish-shaped faucet at one of the kitchen sinks: water is activated by an electric eye in its mouth. On a recent evening, as night fell, Mr. May adjusted the complicated indirect lighting system that had automatically come on outside. He showed that by setting the lighting level outside higher than that inside, he avoids black expanses of plate glass windows at night.

With a turn of the dial, the living room was transformed into an outdoor space, seeming to extend into the meadows, to the most distant light on the last California sycamore. The setting was fit for the sequel of ''Ramona.''

photos of Cliff May and ranch houses he designed (NYT/Tim Street-Porter) (page C8)

http://www.nytimes.com/1986/07/03/garden/the-man-behind-the-ranch-house.html


Buried:
Burial: Unknown

Find A Grave Memorial# 105674070

Clifford married Jean Alice Lichty 19 Oct 1932, San Diego, California. Jean (daughter of Roy Cook Lichty and Alice Wheeler Marble) was born 4 May 1910, Sunnyside, Snohomish, Washington; died 22 Mar 2008, Topanga, Los Angeles, California, United States. [Group Sheet]

Living married Living [Group Sheet]