Great-niece on hunt for Moody cottages

BY ERIC LINDBERG
DAILY SOUND STAFF WRITER

There is something magical about a Moody cottage. It’s an ethereal quality, captured somewhere in the soaring ceilings and open, airy light that pours in from spacious windows. It’s what Marcia Gamble-Hadley, a great-niece of the Moody sisters, calls the “delight factor.”

“People have a real affection for these houses,” Gamble-Hadley told the Daily Sound. “They are the type of place people love to come home to.”
Starting in the 1930s, the Moody sisters - Harriet, Brenda, Mildred and Wilma - designed around 35 cottages throughout Montecito and Santa Barbara. Gamble-Hadley, an architect from Seattle, Wash., who also specializes in small cottages, is on a mission to track down those homes built by her great-aunts, to document their existence and attempt to explain what makes living in them such an uplifting experience.
“I think there is more of a story to tell here than just the houses,” Gamble-Hadley said.
On the brink of designing a neighborhood of historic-form cottages, a career-culminating project, she looked to her family’s contribution to the cottage tradition for inspiration. Much to her surprise, nothing on the Moody style had been written. Now, with original construction drawings by Harriet Moody and a partial list of cottages left by Mildred, Gamble-Hadley has turned her focus to creating the authoritative work on the Moody cottages.
“It will seek to capture and describe the homes that remain,” she said. “It will seek to capture and describe why they seem to be such magical places where people love to live.”
Gamble-Hadley will be in Santa Barbara until mid-July, tracking down cottages from Hope Ranch to Montecito, speaking with their owners and planning for a professional photo shoot next summer. Then she will draft a narrative, a melange of Moody family history, architectural descriptions, photographs and original blueprints, all designed to illustrate the spirit of the cottages.
To fully understand the history of these homes and their designers, however, it is necessary to go back to the turn of the century, when the four sisters started their careers in Santa Barbara. Born in the 1890s, the sisters made their mark on the American Riviera early in their lives.
“They had these amazing careers as single women long before they had the right to vote,” Gamble-Hadley said.
Harriet served as Assistant City Engineer for Santa Barbara before joining a land development and home design firm. Brenda worked as Santa Barbara County Recorder, a loan officer at a building and loan company, and as a real estate broker.
Wilma also worked at a savings and loan in addition to running an antique shop owned by the Moody family. Mildred taught art briefly and worked for a design studio and furniture maker in Los Angeles as a specialist in rosemaling, a type of decorative flower painting.
“Here are four women who made full, contributing careers out of their lives,” Gamble-Hadley said.
Around 1930, Mildred asked her sister Harriet for help remodeling a section the family-owned English Tea Room as a studio for her art projects. Most of the cottage, on Coast Village Road in Montecito, remained open as the tea room, and was later converted to the Moody Antique Shop. All four sisters helped out in the shop throughout the years, along with their mother, who made preserves and served them in the tea room.
As Harriet continued to design small, simple homes with vaulted, open-beam ceilings and wide, airy windows, interest in the community grew. With Harriet designing the structures, Mildred focusing on interior design and detailing, and Brenda and Wilma taking care of financing and land acquisition, Moody cottages began springing up all over Santa Barbara.
It seems to come back to that “delight factor,” Gamble-Hadley said. People don’t feel walled off in a Moody cottage. Windows are tall and wide, offering a connection to nature and the lush gardens that often envelop the homes. Limited floor space prevents an “overburdening of stuff,” she said. “They call you to live simply.”
Although the walls may only rise 6 feet high, the slanted roof often peaks at 12 feet, enhancing the sensation of openness. The Moody sisters also reveled in using odd or recycled windows, Gamble-Hadley said, adding to that homey sensibility.
The four sisters kept building their little cottages throughout the years, never marrying and living together at The Peppers, a large estate on Hot Springs Road in Montecito that they purchased with their father in 1937. Gamble-Hadley often visited that estate during her childhood summers, she said, until Mildred and Wilma sold the land after Harriet and Brenda died in the late 1960s, moving to a smaller home on Pimiento Lane. Wilma died in 1981 and Mildred died at nearly 100 years old in 1996.
These days, Moody homes fetch a handsome price on the real estate market and are highly sought after. Owners are proud to live in a Moody-built cottage, and Gamble-Hadley said she hopes they will continue to open their homes to her as she attempts to document an important part of local history.

For more information on the Moody cottage project, visit www.moodycottages.com.