La Casa de Estudillo

This guide to La Casa de Estudillo in San Diego starts with the fireplaces built into an eighteen twenty-nine adobe that never needed one for warmth, and traces how they got there: novelist Helen Hunt Jackson's eighteen eighty-four romance Ramona, a house she never set foot in, and a newspaper that crowned it Ramona's Marriage Place anyway. It follows the Estudillo family's decline and the building's slow ruin, then businessman John Spreckels's decision to hire architect Hazel Wood Waterman to rebuild it. Look around the corredor at the doors and windows Waterman rearranged.