310 Hawthorne Road

Craftsman cottage of 1917, 727 square feet on a corner lot in North Laguna. The City of Laguna Beach carries it on the historic register with the year, the style and a Mills Act contract set beside the address. The City Council commissioned the citywide survey of historic buildings in 1980; the inventory that came back in July 1981 graded what it found E for Exceptional, K for Key, C for Contributive. Of the 745 properties on that inventory, 130 are rated E, and 310 Hawthorne is one of them.

It goes further than that. The City's Historic Resources Element also lists the house among the 38 properties in Laguna Beach considered eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, in a town where only two buildings, Villa Rockledge and the Cathedral Chapel of St. Francis by-the-Sea, have actually been listed.

The land came out of a subdivision of 1906. Howard G. Heisler and L. C. McKnight bought most of what is now North Laguna from the Irvine Company and laid it out as Laguna Cliffs, the first tract in Laguna with water piped to each lot. By 1912 it was advertising itself as the tract with water. Electric power reached the village in 1915, and this cottage went up two years after that, on one of the tree streets running back from the cliffs.

Published accounts, Architectural Digest among them, describe its first life as a home and studio for the painter Henri De Kruif (1882 to 1944), who exhibited with the Laguna Beach Art Association and showed with the Group of Eight at the Los Angeles Museum in 1927. His work sits today in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Inside, the redwood runs wall to wall and the Douglas fir floors are the boards that were laid. Hammer and Spear, the Los Angeles studio of Scott Jarrell and Kristan Cunningham, kept both and worked around them: hand patinated copper in the kitchen and the bath, a teal handmade tile surround on the stone fireplace in the manner of the Batchelder tiles then being fired in Pasadena, shoji style shutters for privacy, a tatami mat in the sleeping nook, antique Japanese boxes, a vintage Noguchi lantern over the sofa, and the pocket doors restored to their tracks so the rooms can be shut off from one another.

One bedroom and one bath, a skylit great room with a built in banquette in the dining corner and a Viking range in the kitchen. Outside, a picket fence, a lawn and a brick patio on the triangular corner parcel of 2,625 square feet, with a garage. The new roof and the new planting were both completed within Mills Act guidelines. Three blocks up from the beach, a few streets from Cliff Drive, Heisler Park and the Laguna Art Museum, which opened in 1918 as the Laguna Beach Art Association.

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