San Luis Obispo County CA Archives Photo Place.....Graves House 
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File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by:
Joy Fisher sdgenweb@yahoo.com November 25, 2006, 11:04 pm

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THE GRAVES HOUSE 1167 Marsh Street, San Luis Obispo

History and Description:

The house, only forty years old, does not have much history.  Mrs. Graves
presently resides in the house and has since its completion in 1930. 
Construction started in October, 1929, and was finished in the spring of the
following year.  Mrs. Graves watched the house being built and was able to give
me much information about the event.

Mr. Graves was a mining engineer and he designed the house and gave his
specifications to Ernest Steiner of the Maino Construction Company to draw
plans. Mr. Graves, being in the business that he was, tended to over-design the
structure and as Mrs; Graves says about nearly everything, "they do not build
them like they used to".  The house sits on a concrete floor spanning steel
reinforced concrete girders 12" x 24" and approximately six feet on center. 
These in turn sit on a retaining wall, supervised by the city engineer, which
goes seven feet into the creek bed and has a four-foot-wide base.  Steel track
from the Southern Pacific Railroad was used as a reinforcement in the wall.

Theodore Maino, Senior, was the contractor and he contracted the Faulstich
Brothers to do the extensive tile work and James Quaglino to do the roof, which
has a pitch of approximately 50 degrees and is covered with rigid asbestos
shingles, still in place, and supported by six-inch-thick stucco-faced walls.

Materials were secured from throughout the country: tile from Ohio, light
fixtures from Chicago, leaded windows from Oakland, 3/4" oak plank flooring from
Tennessee, and Philippine mahogany (used extensively) from a lumber yard in
Oakland which made a gift of the front door designed by Mr. Graves.  The lumber
yard milled the mahogany door frames, which are a shallow pointed arch in shape.

The house has many fine personal details:  a laundry chute from the hall to the
basement, huge closets with drawers and sliding doors, a "cubby hole" for home
delivered groceries, and a food cooler, the bottom of which opens into the
always-cool basement, and bathroom tile hand picked by Mr. Graves.  Mr. Graves
also designed the balustrade along the back porch and made the mold for the
vertical members of this and individually cast each one.  The house was Mr.
Graves' only endeavor into architecture.

Sources:
Mrs. Lester Graves, owner


Additional Comments:
Extracted from

Discovering San Luis Obispo County
by
Carleton M. Winslow


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