Renaissance Man
Henry Lenny makes and remakes Santa Barbara’s architectural face
Written by Josef Woodard | Photographs by Dewey Nicks | Drawings by Henry Lenny
It is fair to say that the seasoned architect Henry Lenny has played an instrumental role in making and maintaining Santa Barbara’s architectural heritage and landscape. His careful work has gone into restorations of El Paseo in the mid-1980s and the heralded, major redo of the El Encanto—that beacon on the hill—from 2001 until it reopened after its renovation in 2013. Also on his résumé are projects at the Presidio and the grand 1929-vintage courthouse—both hallmarks of Santa Barbara’s cultural and civic identity—along with a long list of residential and hospitality projects and a client list including Ty Warner, Fess Parker, the late El Encanto owner Erik Friden, among countless others.
Lenny’s work has taken root in the 805, in San Clemente, and other parts of Southern California; in Las Vegas; and globally in China, Abu Dhabi, and soon in London.
But when speaking about his work, as he did one afternoon in the living room-turned-studio of his Carpinteria home—with a small avocado orchard in the backyard and his living space speckled with objets d’art from his travels—Lenny’s thoughts and references extend beyond his own doings. Well-studied and well-traveled, Lenny pointed to examples of other architects’ work in the city he has called home for 30-plus years. Those architectural riches include Montecito houses designed by Bernard Maybeck, Bertram Goodhue, Roland Coates, Addison Mizner, and, of course, George Washington Smith—the guru and spearhead of the Spanish Colonial Revival style. “The whole city is a fascinating history book,” says Lenny. “It’s a museum of architecture. You’ll find everything here.”
Hailing from Guadalajara, Mexico, where he studied at the Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara school of architecture, Lenny made his way to Santa Barbara in 1983, a defining moment of change and focus. “Even though I was trained and educated by professors who were modernists,” he says, “I came to Santa Barbara, and my style had to change. But I feel quite comfortable working in any style. I have always been a student of the history of architecture. The principles are all the same. I can do everything from Chinese architecture to Spanish to very modern buildings.”
As a longtime member of the Historic Landmarks Commission, Lenny also coauthored the guidelines for the “Pueblo Viejo” style sheet that—although controversial in some quarters—has turned Santa Barbara into a model of a unified architectural city plan, as led by the Architectural Board of Review and other governing bodies.
Whereas some architects have been frustrated by ABR demands, Lenny admits, “I never really have a problem getting anything approved, because I understand and I present things that I know are compatible with Santa Barbara. I want to make sure that my work does not destroy the character-defining principles of what Santa Barbara started out with. After the 1925 earthquake, a lot of architects got together and created a vision. The vision was to create a wonderful village by the sea.”
He needs no coaxing to wax eloquent about his adopted hometown and its special character. As he points out, “Charles Moore [the famed architect Lenny has collaborated with] used to say, ‘Santa Barbara reminds me of a place that I had never been to before.’ Santa Barbara, I can say, is a dream that you experience while you’re awake. And that experience must be preserved long after I’m gone and hopefully through generations in the future.”
Designer Tammy Hughes, along with her partner/husband, Kim, have known, worked with, and admired Lenny for many years. Among the projects they have called on Lenny to collaborate on were a “Tuscan palazzo”-style house in Hope Ranch, a Mediterranean beachfront house on the Mesa, and a current ambitious renovation of a century-old house with Lockwood DeForest landscaping on Ortega Ridge.
Tammy refers to Lenny as being among “the last of the dreamers,” she says. “We’ve moved into such a technological age, and even the great architects have moved into doing a lot of their work digitally. He can draw it out on a cocktail napkin in five minutes, a sketch that can blow your mind. It’s like breathing for him. He’s an artist before an architect in my mind. He has such a good sense of scale and composition, and that comes from his painting.”
Referring to Lenny’s deep grasp of architectural principles mixed with an innately creative spirit, she adds that “when you know the rules as well as he does, then you can bend them a little bit. He understands classical architecture like no one, and yet he likes to riff of them, while always making sure you keep the details.”
Lenny was once part of a large firm with 39 employees but felt creatively hampered by the group’s corporate nature. He pared down to just a small firm, now with an office by Cabrillo Boulevard. But he likes to work in the quiet and privacy of his home studio, where, on this afternoon, the larger drawing board held a scrolling, highly detailed painting/rendering of a massive multiuse project in progress in Fort Apache, near Las Vegas.
Favoring handmade fixtures and detailing (“I’m not a fan of selecting things off the shelf,” he says), Lenny also relies on old-school, hands-on, and nondigital design work. “In every single project that I do,” Lenny asserts, “I start out with a painting or a rendering. From there, I develop it more and more. I do everything to scale, meaning the dimensions are correct. That makes it easier for the people who do the construction documents to scale it—to scan it, put in a program, and it gives them the dimensions.”
Paper counts for much in a Lenny project: “I do little projects and big projects,” he shrugs while pointing to the epic Fort Apache project filling his work table. “That’s just a bigger piece of paper that I’m working with.”
As for 2020, Lenny comments, “This feels like the best period of my life. I’m 72. I’ll never retire. I’m still painting. I’m still designing. I was too confused when I was 30. You know how it is with us—the first years of our life, we spend gathering knowledge, and at some point in time, we become so cocky that we say, ‘I think I now know everything there is to know about everything.’
“Years later, you realize that you know nothing. You absolutely know nothing. That’s when knowledge turns to wisdom, when you become a wise man, you finally realize who you are, what you are, and where you stand in the world.” •
