The renovation of a historically designated duplex in La Jolla Shores with a unique background recently won a San Diego Historical Resources Board Preservation Award for 2024, with trustees commending the project for preserving the building’s signature features.

The Ruth Smith and Louise Neece/Lloyd Ruocco & Homer Delawie Duplex was built in 1960 at 8015-8017 El Paseo Grande.

HRB Chairman Tim Hutter said the renovation “involved a comprehensive rehabilitation effort [with] a first-floor interior remodel done alongside a second-story addition and third-floor view deck. The project … integrated key design techniques from architects Lloyd Ruocco and Homer Delawie. Beyond historical preservation and sustainable design, the project contributes to affordable housing by maintaining the duplex as rental housing.”

Behind it all was La Jolla firm IS Architecture, with Heather Crane as the project manager and Ione Stiegler as the principal architect.

Stiegler said property owner Christopher Kearns bought the duplex several years ago when he was living in San Diego as a young lawyer.

“As his career moved him around the country, he kept the property, which was a nice little duplex, for income earning,” Stiegler said.

In the latter part of his career, Kearns and friend Lesley Kroupa wanted to make the La Jolla Shores house their permanent residence and decided to remodel the property with one side as a rental and the other side made larger to be their home.

“We helped work with them to get a design that respected the Delawie/Ruocco design and enabled us to add a little bit of square footage to the first floor and the majority of the added square footage at the rear of the property on the second story,” Stiegler said. “And at that location, a third-floor viewing deck was quite enticing.”

The team also worked on retaining character-defining features, including angular rooflines and gabled roofs that extend out to create a carport, plus a roughly U-shaped floor plan. The property also featured “peek-a-boo” spaces in the roof to allow plants to grow in the interior.

To make the addition in line with the original design but different enough to be distinguishable, the team mimicked the asymmetrical roofline on the second floor and roof deck and added more peek-a-boo cutouts so plants could grow between the ground floor and the roof deck.

Hutter said the HRB’s Preservation Award honors “individuals, groups, businesses and agencies that contribute to the preservation of San Diego and advance our understanding of San Diego’s history and heritage.”

Stiegler said her clients “moderated their goals so the historic building could be honored while making it livable for themselves. Someone else might have tried to do a lot more that would have heavily impacted the building.”

Stiegler said she was “very honored and thrilled for the clients” to receive the award.

In 2019, the Historical Resources Board designated the duplex as historic with a period of significance of 1960 under HRB Criterion C, indicating the property embodies distinctive characteristics of a style, type, period or method of construction or is a valuable example of the use of natural materials or craftsmanship; and Criterion D, indicating the property is representative of a notable work of a master builder, designer, architect, engineer, landscape architect, interior designer, artist or craftsman.

The work to renovate the property in line with the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties began shortly after the designation.

According to an HRB report at the time, Ruocco has been called the second most significant modernist architect in San Diego history, after Irving Gill, and the city’s “No. 1 designer and thinker” during the 1950s and ’60s. ♦