November 5th, 2006.
A magic sunset.
Carlsbad has many great homes. Most folks don't know that Carlsbad was also the home of one of the worlds most famous architects.
Irving Gill.
Something in the atmosphere around Carlsbad has brought one of the worlds most celebrated architects to his knees. So said Craftsman Magazine.
It became clear then just why Mr. Gill was so intensely interested in the architectural development of the Carlsbad district, nourishing a secret ambition to so encourage the future building of the city that its individual architecture should be so patterned and designed as to not only produce a city of beauty in which to live, but also a city whose peculiar and efficient architecture would attract the attention of wealth and culture.
Carlsbad will welcome this distinguished couple and no doubt will be more than pleased to counsel with Mr. Gill in its future building projects to the end that Carlsbad will become the real city beautiful.
The Carlsbad Journal 25 May, 1928
It is an architecture of modesty, of repetition, but the elements repeated were the ones which his perceptive eye recognized as good: . . I like the bare honesty of these houses, the childlike frankness and chaste simplicity of them."
"I supply the yeast, so to speak," Louis Sullivan expressed his relationship to his young draftsmen, "and allow the ferment to work in them." Louis Sullivan was mentoring Irving Gill as well as a young architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
That statement provides an admittedly rough segue into the modest wine making efforts beginning at Herons House. Pete Anderson is our mentor and just as Louis Sullivan provided the yeast for the young architects, Pete Anderson is providing the "yeast" for this new winemaker.
The sunset, pictured below, provides some insight into why Irving Gill found Carlsbad to be the magical environment that it is today.
