The Growth of Storybook Architecture in the World

Spadena House is one of the world's architectural development heritage built in 1921 as offices and dressing rooms for Irvin Willat's film studio in Curver City, California. The Spadena house was designed by Hollywood director Harry Oliver, who was already famous for many of his film works in the early 20th century. A unique house with strange small windows and a pointed sloping roof with a dilapidated façade appearance makes this house look unique and shaped differently from other buildings around it. In its development, in 1926, this house was moved to the Beverly Hills area and converted into a private home. Spadena House is one of the perfect examples of the development of Storybook Architecture that developed in the mid-20th century and made Harry Oliver one of the main figures in the development of architecture in the 1920s with his concept of Storybook Architecture.

Spadena House,Photo by CRE8 DESIGN in SHUTTERSTOCK

The concept of Storybook Architecture was developed from the content of fairy tales that explain the beauty of ancient European building structures and settlements, with strange building shapes such as crooked walls, sloping roofs, and even the use of clay and stone as materials with natural color finishing. This architectural concept developed in Los Angeles and Northern California America in the early 1920s, it was short-lived until the 1930s because it was displaced by modern medieval life. With this short history, the concept of Storybook Architecture gave birth to many buildings that have become iconic today, such as hobbit houses, witch's dens, fairy-tale castles, and village courts designated as landmarks in Los Angeles. Other examples in Los Angeles include the Snow White Cottages designed in 1931 by architect Ben Sherwood, Charlie Chaplin Studios built in 1919 by architects Meyer &; Holler, Charlie Chaplin Cottages built in 1923 by Arthur and Nina Zwebell, and the "Hobbit House" built between 1940 and 1970 by Disney artist Lawrence Joseph.

Hugh W. Comstock's The Tuck Box storybook house, Photo by Wikipedia

The history of the development of the concept of Storybook Architecture is indeed shorter than other architectural concepts, but this concept has attracted the attention of people who admire the beauty of imagination in fairy tales. Storybook Architecture refers to Hollywood design which is technically called Provincial Revivalism and more commonly called Fairy Tales or Hansel and Gretel. While there's no specific definition of the concept of Storybook Architecture, one possibility is that it's a sense of playfulness and free imagination. Most seem jolted out of the steep old village world with deliberately uneven roofs, many cobblestones, doors, and windows that may look mismatched and oddly shaped. In addition to the three buildings designated as Los Angeles landmarks, Disneyland can classify as one of the concepts of Storybook Architecture that is still widely visited.