Adobe Houses: Homes of Sun and Earth

This large, square-shaped volume of high-quality production well deserves to be displayed on a coffee table—it is a beautiful volume. Kathryn Masson and her photographer, David Glomb, feature twenty-three adobe homes, mainly on the central California coast. Entitled Adobe Houses, it combines large and gorgeous photos with well-written and interesting text describing the interior and exterior of each adobe house in fine detail. They are all beautiful houses that, needless to say, shout wealth. Every photograph has a good, descriptive caption. In the introduction, Masson takes us through the history of adobe construction and the making of adobe bricks. Having been built on active earthquake zones, most of the houses are of single story ones that resist earthquake. Each adobe has its history in some detail, when it was built and by whom, and subsequent changes of ownership and remodeling. Though less expensive to build, adobe homes require constant maintenance. They are presented here in chronological order, starting at about 1818 and continuing until the latest, still a work in progress, in 2000. There are adobe houses owned by the less wealthy, but they are not included in this volume.