102 Ocean Way
Santa Monica, CA 90402, USA

102 Ocean Way, Santa Monica, CA, USA

Excerpt from the Statement of Significance:

In 1922, Lewis L. Bradbury (born 1881), the wealthy youngest son of a pioneer Los Angeles real estate developer and mine owner, and himself a major real estate holder, commissioned Santa Monica architect John W. Byers to design a beach home for him and his family at the northern edge of Santa Monica. The house was to be in the Spanish Colonial Revival style and constructed of adobe. Byers was just beginning to make a name for himself, not only as a specialist in the style, but as an enthusiastic proponent of adobe construction.

John Winford Byers has been described by a number of architectural critics as one of the finest exponents of pure Spanish Colonial design in Southern California, although he was entirely self-taught in architecture. Bom in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on March 22, 1875, Byers was the son of James Albion and Sarah Elizabeth (Dunbar) Byers. After graduating from the public schools of Grand Rapids in 1894, he earned a degree in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan in 1898, taking post-graduate work in the subject at Harvard.

Seemingly a man of many interests, Byers served on the United States Commission at the Paris Exposition of 1900-1901 and then taught French and English at the North American Academy in Montevideo, Uruguay. It was there he probably cultivated his interest in Spanish Colonial styles. In 1902, Byers became part-owner of, and instructor at the Hitchcock Military Academy in San Rafael, California. In 1910, he moved to Santa Monica, where he was appointed head of the Romance languages department at Santa Monica High School. Although he continued in this position until 1920, his first love was the espousal of Spanish Colonial Revival design and workmanship. In 1919, he set up the John Byers Mexican Handmade Tile Company, employing native Mexicans to make roofing and floor tiles and adobe mud bricks adapted to modem construction standards. Specialized mixing machines, kilns, and a work-yard were set up for this purpose. Byers not only produced adobe bricks and tiles but began to design adobe houses.

By the time Byers obtained his architect’s license in 1926, he had already designed a number of houses, almost all of them in Santa Monica. His “designs set an example which others followed to good effect, making northern Santa Monica an architectural monument of traditional images of the twenties and thirties” (Gebhard 21). Byers’ zeal for adobe construction prompted him to write a number of articles on the subject for regional magazines, such as California Arts & Architecture. He also set up an organization “for the design and building of Latin houses.”

In an article in the May 17, 1931 issue of the Los Angeles Times, Byers said no other building material had a more romantic, interesting past than the “very simple, sunbaked mud brick.” He not only cited its cheapness to make, its stability, and its insulation qualities, but also praised its adaptability to various styles, allowing deep reveals at doors and windows impossible with ordinary construction materials. “Buildings of adobe are replete with a delicate and elusive charm,” he said, “and there is an easy plasticity about the material that makes it particularly suitable to the Spanish or California type of architecture.”
Later in his career, often in association with one of the few' female architects of the time, Edla Muir, Byers branched out into other styles, such as Monterey Colonial (a variant of Spanish Colonial), English, French Norman, and American Colonial. Like other architects of the 1930s, he “developed free-flowing interior spaces and indoor/outdoor relationships, then clothed them in forms which delicately suggested the past’" (Gebhard xxii). His designs began to appear outside Santa Monica, in such locales as Brentwood, Pacific Palisades, La Canada, Coachella, the Victor Valley, and even Vancouver, British Columbia. Many of his houses attracted the attention of critics and were regularly featured in such publications as The Architectural Digest. As his fame spread, Byers attracted such celebrity' clients as Norma Shearer, Irvin S. Cobb, Constance Talmadge, Joel McCrea, Buster Crabbe, Shirley Temple, and J. Paul Getty.

Byers and his wife Harriet (Staley) Byers, married in 1915, had no children of their own, but John helped Harriet raise her son from a previous marriage. Byers’ main recreational pursuit seems to have been golf, as he was an active member of the Brentwood Country' Club, for which he had designed the clubhouse in 1925.

Having more or less retired before World War II (although at least one house from 1950 has been credited to him), John Byers died on May 22, 1966 at the age of 91. His papers, including many planning documents, were given to the University of California, Santa Barbara, where they are housed in the University Art Museum.

Lumber used in the Bradbury house is said to have come from a mile-long wharf that was being dismantled less than a mile away—at one time part of Henry Huntington’s planned Port Los Angeles. Although Byers was manufacturing his own tiles by the time the Bradbury house was built, it is not clear if he produced any of its vast array of tile-work. It has been pointed out that many of the tiles are similar to those found in a catalog produced by the S & S Tile Company of San Jose, owned by A. L. Solon and F. P. Schemmel.

Based on historic photographs, it appears that later alterations to the house and property have been relatively minor. At an unknown date after 1946, the property-line wall that once enclosed only the motor court area in front of the garage/guesthouse was extended to border the entire property on its west and south sides. It was probably also at this time the wooden gates into the motor court area were changed to wrought iron to match the new pedestrian entry gate leading to the front door.

In 1971, well-known Southern California architect Wallace Neff designed alterations to the garage/guesthouse wing. The original wooden garage doors were removed. The opening on the north end was filled with an arched French door and the former two-car space on the south end was narrowed, becoming the current breezeway. The fenestration on the second story of the garage/guesthouse remained the same, except that the middle square window' was replaced with an oculus.

Neff also made some changes on the south elevation of the house in the living-room area. What were probably originally French doors on the east end of the first story of the south wall became two solid-glass vertically-oriented windows with a row of horizontal wood venting at the bottom. The balcony on the east end of the second floor, dissimilar in appearance to those on the rest of the house, was also undoubtedly Neff’s work. The French doors opening onto it probably replaced a smaller casement window. All remaining alterations were made to interior spaces and are not visible from the exterior.

A swimming pool was also constructed in 1971. At the same time, the property was newly landscaped, its design credited to Edward Huntsman-Trout, a colleague of Neff.