Author: Sunny Gables Estate

This photograph of Sunny Gables Estate appears in the May, 1931 edition of Architectural Digest. All of the home’s details remain intact, including the original roof, now 96 years old.

Charles Adams Gibbs was the landscape architect for Sunny Gables. Featured in 1928’s Architectural Digest for the W K Kellogg home in Pomona, and well known for the Historic Dater House in Montecito; our large scrolls of his designs, kept in the archives on-site, have hand written notes with owner R T Moore. Gibbs was best known for his use of native California plants and sense of directional light. This harmonized with Moore’s collection of 55,000 Mexican birds and use of Mayan symbolism to express time and space.

Not only is the roof still over our heads, many of the camellias in the photo will soon bloom; and, see the little sycamore tree halfway down the stone path? It continues to grow westward…

Robert Thomas Moore

…would eventually pass away quietly on October 30, 1958.

Some fifty feet below the weather vane marked “Swallows Take Flight” on the blueprint by Robert Ainsworth, is a triple-door Mosler Bank Vault manufactured in 1928. The vault was positioned facing exactly North and the entire estate was constructed around this central rotunda.

As the sun rises in the East and makes it way across the sky; each day of the year offers subtle color changes along the 100-foot long column of arches.
A view gazing North:

Entering toward the South in the evening:

The rays of Eastern morning light:

The warm glow of a setting sun…

A peaceful evening at Sunny Gables:

FOLLOW THE LIGHT and visit us at Sunny Gables Estate!

We’ve got leaves on our lilies the size of elephant ears!

French Norman architecture looks like English Tudor–except for one important distinguishing feature: a tower-like structure topped with a conical shaped roof.

Sunny Gables Estate is a classic example.

These are both European, medieval revivalists styles that feature hand-hewn half-timber and rough plaster exteriors with brick and stone cladding, wrought-iron details, high-pitched, front-facing gables and diamond-cut, leaded-glass windows.

Public interior rooms are centered around massive fireplaces, surrounded by floor-to ceiling wood panels; smooth and rough plaster walls with exposed wood-beam ceilings, and wrought-iron hardware on railings, light fixtures, doors and windows often with gothic designs.

How did these two styles diverge? The story of that battle is for another day.

Stay tuned.