House of Sand & Mud

 “I can’t tell you how many Domino’s pizzas I’ve eaten for free,” J.P. Van Swae said, standing in the driveway leading to his family’s historic home. “Because the delivery guy couldn’t find the house in 30 minutes or less.”

Van Swae is tall and handsome, with a demeanor that seems both mischievous and old-timey, a cowboy with a scheme up his sleeve. We stood at the edge of his property, along Camino Capistrano, on a plot of land not exactly rural, or even out of view. The I-5 thundered overhead, directly adjacent to the old camino—now a major artery itself. In fact, the reason we’d walked into the drive was so that Van Swae could describe the time that an 18-wheeler jumped the freeway barriers and trundled onto the embankment and street, some 15- to 20-feet below. He recalled watching the trucker emerge from the cab alive. But, he said, “I could stand naked right here [below the new Marriott Resident Inn, above a trailer park, and within view of a Costco] and nobody would see me.”

I believed him, wholeheartedly, because nobody seemed to see the historic treasure standing 100-feet away: the Pablo Pryor Adobe/Hide House, the oldest continuously inhabited structure in California, and one of the oldest houses in what is now the United States. Historians have dated the home to at least 1790, but say it could very well be older. By contrast, the “oldest surviving building in California,” is claimed by the Serra Chapel (1782) right down the way at Mission San Juan Capistrano. Yet the structures worked in tandem—and which came first is hard to say.

This property served as a storage facility for the mission’s dried cowhides, an operation described in Richard Henry Dana’s memoir about his time in the trade, Two Years Before the Mast. Once within view of the ocean and San Juan Point, it also functioned as a lookout for pirates and was the mission’s connection to any sea-going vessels. 

By 1846, the house anchored a 6,607-acre land grant called Rancho Boca de la Playa. It was purchased from the original grantee, Don Emigdio Vejar, by Van Swae’s direct ancestor, Juan “El Rico” Avila, in 1860. The adobe was handed down through the generations to Van Swae’s grandmother, Cecilia Yorba. Today, Van Swae is raising his own two daughters in the home. “It’s a family house,” said his mother, Jennifer.
“It’s always been a family house.”

For a number of reasons, the property is also paramount to the history and culture of surfing in California. The original grant—from Killer Dana in the north, through Doheny, and into San Clemente—comprised one of the most varied, surf-drenched coasts in the world. Importantly, Van Swae’s grandfather, Cecelia Yorba’s husband, was Lorrin “Whitey” Harrison, a preeminent surf pioneer, and prolific craftsman and inventor. 

Having stowed away to Hawaii in 1932, and having returned many times to the Islands over his long lifetime—with his palm frond hats, canoes, and ukuleles—Whitey served as a link between Hawaiian culture and the California beach scene. It was inevitable that Cecilia Yorba’s house became central to this cultural exchange. And the fact that it lay adjacent to the only road to the beach made it a mandatory way station for early surfers, fishermen, and musicians. “Everybody knew it as a special house,” said family friend Art Brewer. “It gathered these creative, brilliant people.”

Van Swae is now the custodian of this complex heritage: his home’s direct line to Spanish California on the one hand and, on the other, his family’s impact on surfing and beach culture. He is also a celebrated photographer who has taught photography internationally with his mentor, Brewer, and who additionally worked as a photo editor at Surfer magazine for a number of years. 

He and I partnered on editorial projects during that time, so I’d visited his home before. As old and rock steady as the house, barn, and outbuildings were, the landscape around seemed to me in constant flux. I viewed it almost as one might view time-lapse video. When I returned in December, after some time away, I was struck by the giant Marriott that now loomed in what was once the backyard. And to the west, having taken over a car dealership, the Costco seemed to be creeping closer. 

Despite whatever is going on outside, the Hide House seems to pull you in. The most useful door leads to the kitchen, a space that Jennifer called “the heart of the house.” On the day I visited, Van Swae’s young daughters were sitting at a long table, eating and watching videos on a tablet. (Van Swae’s mother remembers her father Lorrin sitting in the same spot, mending fish nets on stormy winter days.) At other times, there was music, gathering, and always, cooking—Van Swae swore by his grandmother Cecilia’s ground abalone hamburgers. 

The historic break, Killer Dana, was destroyed by harbor construction in 1966, which made a black and white photo hanging in the kitchen— of Whitey in trim on the point—shocking in its feeling of immediacy, as if the glide could be happening now. Despite the many children who have grown up here, artifacts and antiques just seem to hang around. 

Crates of giant abalone shells were still scattered about the yard. In the kitchen, Van Swae was doing some re-arranging and had various items sitting on the floor: Whitey’s brass diving mask, a wooden planer, a surfing trophy, an ab knife, and a palm frond hat. There were old images too, one of señoritas and a caballero in front of the house, another of the walnut and avocado orchard that stood where the trailer park is now. I scanned a leaflet advertising Whitey’s shaping business. It had two addresses: Doheny Beach on Saturday and Sunday, and “Box 3” Capistrano Beach, California. “I don’t know who the other two boxes in town belonged to,” Van Swae said.

The Hide House looks much larger than it is, and part of the effect has to do with the adobe walls, which are three feet thick with an insulating layer between an inner and outer wall. The kitchen was added onto the adobe structure and, entering the adjoining rooms from there, one can feel the change. It’s darker and hushed. Because of the construction, these rooms stay cool all summer long. “If you look close enough,” Van Swae said, “you’ll see that nothing is square.” 

He pointed to the window casements, which had become trapezoids over time. The house may have been off kilter, but it was full of treasures. Van Swae once found a gold coin behind the fireplace. A grandfather clock, which had come to California via ship around Cape Horn, stood nearby, decorated with a painting of Napoleon. In a drawer was a photo album with family pictures of a trip to Yosemite in a horse-drawn wagon. 

According to historians, the pitched roof is newer than the adobe structure. This improvement provided room for an attic, which was a boon for Cecelia Yorba. In her seventies, she spent time sitting in the attic window with a pellet gun, shooting crows that pilfered walnuts from one of her orchard’s last trees. As she aged, she became too weak to properly pump the gun and the pellets just plopped out. Van Swae returned to the family home in his twenties to care for her. He lived in the barn, and would hike up to the attic to pump his grandmother’s gun. 

The house may hold the majority of the historic prestige, but the barn, a few years younger, was once pointed toward modernity. This is where Whitey made his “Surfboard of the Future,” among many other things. Whitey’s brother worked in aerospace and, before Clark Foam dominated the scene, Whitey borrowed from his brother’s knowledge to blow foam blanks in concrete molds. He also made lightweight canoes. Having come across a relic he admired in Tahiti, he measured it with sticks, brought the bundle of kindling home, and fashioned a fiberglass version next to the barn. The molds are still there. Inside are stacks of boards: a kook box, a hot curl, Greg Noll’s redwood from a collaborative project. Dozens of canoe paddles line a wall. There’s a homemade drill press, and homemade abalone knives. “My grandfather had a little bit of ‘get it done’ in him,” Van Swae said. “He’d drag me with him to the hardware store. He’d pick up a tool and look at it for a while. Then he’d set the tool down. We’d come home, and he’d make his own.” 

Whitey’s knack for “up-cycling” was legendary. Along a wall of the barn stretches one of the biggest surfboards I’ve ever seen, a vessel that Whitey fashioned from a telephone pole he’d picked up someplace. The board’s rails revealed a distinctive roundness.

Van Swae and I emerged from the barn into a golden December afternoon. At some point an off-ramp of the Coast Highway had been raised in a way that blocked the Hide House’s view of the ocean, but you could feel the water’s presence in the west. Van Swae’s mother watched most of this development in her lifetime. She described a forested plot they owned down by San Juan Creek, and how the watercourse flooded onto the lowlands every spring. She saw blue heron down there, deer, and even mountain lions. She’d ride her horse in the soft creek bed all the way to Doheny Beach where the steed would swim and even ride in with the waves. 

The coast has been altered and the creek, once populated by stealhead trout, has been paved. The family donated some land for a park, but mostly, using imminent domain, the city has chiseled away at their holdings for a myriad of uses. According to Jennifer, the city once took a parcel from them and then gave it to a private company. “Imminent domain should be reserved for really important, essential purposes,” she said. “It’s a crime that my mother had to have a lawyer on retainer her entire life to fight it.”

Dozens of times, mostly in the winter, I’ve looked across this valley and thought—from the glassy kelp beds offshore, to the wetlands, to the creek and grassy hills rising to a perfect pinnacle in the snow-capped Santa Ana mountains—that this must have been one of the most beautiful coastal valleys in the world. After a moment, I’ve also always asked myself: what kind of aesthetically-deficient city planners would fill it with a freeway, a Costco, car dealerships, and even pave the river? Who would cover the groves of Tecate cypress, Torrey and Bishop pines with stucco boxes?

Cecelia Yorba deeply valued contiguous open space and raw, natural landscapes—so much so that she signed environmental easements to protect portions of her property. Her descendants, including Van Swae, have inherited this value system. For the most part, however, the Hide House is all that is left of Rancho Boca de la Playa. This is because cities in Southern California often view open space as land that isn’t turning over revenue—deadbeat nature. And they have the power to take it and fill it with 99 Cent Stores and donut shops. 

Officials say they value heritage, and they’ll erect a statue or two, but when it comes to the real thing, like Van Swae’s errant Domino’s drivers, city governments are so busy breaking space and time into money that they completely miss the point.