The Kitchen Sisters Present · The Kitchen Sisters & Radiotopia

Lutah Maria Riggs Designs the American Riviera

April 7, 2026·43 min·3 clips

Riggs attended her own Lobero Theater premieres in a mangy leopard-skin coat and curled slippers, and checked her cabinet finishes with a dentist's mirror.

1. The Kitchen Sisters Present profiles Lutah Maria Riggs, a largely unheralded architect who designed much of the Santa Barbara and Montecito built environment across six decades of practice. 2. Host Alexandra Lang presents the episode for New Angle Voice, produced by Brandi Howell for the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation; voices include archivist Melinda Gandara, architecture professor Volker Welter, city architectural historian Nicole Hernandez, and Vedanta nun Pravrajika Vrajaprana. 3. The episode's central argument is that Riggs shaped what is now called 'California casual' indoor-outdoor architecture — stucco arches, red tile roofs, exposed beams — and that her houses remain highly prized without her name being widely known. 4. Riggs was born in Ohio in 1896 to a physician father who later abandoned the family, leaving Riggs without a stable home — a biographical fact the archivist suggests drove her lifelong obsession with designing excellent domestic spaces. 5. She won a scholarship to UC Berkeley by selling subscriptions for the Santa Barbara News Press, becoming one of five or six women in the architecture program under John Galen Howard, who used the Beaux-Arts system modeled on the Paris Ecole. 6. After graduating she was turned down repeatedly during the late-1920s economic contraction, sought work from Julia Morgan who also had nothing available, before landing a trial position with George Washington Smith that became a full hire after he saw her drafting skills. 7. Multiple speakers note that many surviving drawings from the George Washington Smith office bear Riggs's signature, and that she became a major influence on his work before and after taking over the practice when Smith died in March 1930. 8. Riggs traveled to Spain, Mexico, and other countries with Smith and his wife, and her design for the 1925 Lobero Theater façade was directly inspired by a Spanish palace she spotted from a train window before the train had fully stopped. 9. The Lobero Theater, which replaced Jose Lobero's original 1870s opera house that was structurally unsound, is now the oldest continuously operating theater in California and was named one of the 11 most beautiful theaters in the world by Architectural Digest. 10. After Smith's death, Riggs took over his office, continued his client relationships with Montecito's wealthy elite including Ford Motor family members and Hollywood figures, and expanded her own commissions. 11. A pivotal shift came when client Emily von Romberg saw a modernist model at a MoMA Surrealism exhibition in New York and mid-construction called Santa Barbara to stop building and have the entire von Romberg house redesigned as a modernist work. 12. Riggs brought on Arvin Shaw, a Yale-trained architect and WWII veteran, as a partner in the postwar period; Welter credits Shaw as crucial to her modernist transition but notes it was Riggs who solved the key floor plan problem on the Alice Irving House when Shaw had been stuck for weeks. 13. The Alice Irving House was featured in Time magazine as a 'Glass Tent' — a mid-century modernist structure with walls of glass facing the Santa Ynez mountain range that was so iconic it significantly raised Riggs's public profile. 14. During WWII Riggs was forced to close her office due to lack of commissions and worked for MGM in Hollywood doing set designs before re-establishing her Santa Barbara practice after the war. 15. Riggs designed the Vedanta Temple in Santa Barbara after Swami Prabhavananda gave her a commission with the instruction 'I've never been in a church I like — make me one you do'; she studied South Indian architecture specifically to execute it correctly, using hand-formed roof tiles baked over a man's thigh, many signed by the maker. 16. Riggs reportedly said the Vedanta Temple was the best of her work, and the temple's abbess describes her as 'unique, quite eccentric' and deeply aligned with Vedanta philosophy. 17. Riggs's personal style was memorable for its indifference to appearance — she appeared at Lobero Theater events in a mangy leopard-skin coat, hairnet, and upturned slippers — contrasted with her obsessive attention to craft: she used a dentist mirror to check the underside of cabinet doors. 18. The episode documents her as a non-conformist in her client relationships, designing homes for single women, single gay men such as Wright Luddington, and others outside conventional social norms without hesitation. 19. Listeners who are drawn to stories of underrecognized women in the history of American design, California architecture, and Santa Barbara social history will find the episode richly detailed. 20. Those seeking a conventional biography format or policy-level analysis of architectural preservation will find the episodic multi-voice documentary style more impressionistic.

As heard by us

A quiet architectural portrait shaped by a Montecito discovery and the Lobero Theater's layered history.

A remembered floor in a Montecito house opens into a patient portrait of Lutah Maria Riggs, the Santa Barbara architect whose work still lives in homes, theaters, and local memory.

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Why you'd press play

A Santa Barbara architecture trail that starts with one remembered floor.

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