Monterey Colonial: the adobe-and-balcony style born on these streets

Monterey lent its name to an American architectural style, and the origin is a specific, still-standing building. Around 1835 the merchant Thomas Larkin — later the only United States consul to Mexican California — built a two-story house in town that fused local Spanish adobe construction with a New England sensibility: thick adobe walls, a hipped roof, and, above all, a second-story wood balcony running the front. The Larkin House, today a designated National Historic Landmark and part of Monterey State Historic Park, is the touchstone of what became known as Monterey Colonial.

The style traveled far beyond the Peninsula and drew a major revival across California in the 1920s and 1930s, but its interior logic stayed consistent: substantial walls, deep window reveals, exposed wood, and a general restraint suited to the honesty of adobe. Interiors in this tradition tend to sit more comfortably with surfaces that feel worked by hand and colors drawn from earth and plaster than with busy, high-gloss pattern — a matter of what suits the room rather than a fixed rule.

That inheritance matters when you dress a Peninsula wall today, even in a house that is not literally adobe. The regional vocabulary handed down from Monterey Colonial favors matte finishes, warm neutrals, and texture with a made quality. A wallpaper with a plaster-like ground, a hand-blocked feel, or a natural fiber settles easily into a room carrying any echo of the style, while a slick, large-scale print can look imported from a different climate.

None of this rules out pattern — it argues for pattern that shows its hand. A soft botanical, an organic geometric, or a documentary print with visible craft belongs; a mechanically polished repeat tends to fight the room. Larkin's house was itself a hybrid of two building cultures that each respected their materials, and interiors that carry the same respect for surface still read, unmistakably, as belonging to this coast.