Responsiveness—to history, to style, to context and, not the least, to clients—is Marc Appleton’s specialty. “I want to make sure that my personal signature doesn’t overwhelm the simplicity and appropriateness of a design,” says the architect, who is known for his mastery of classic styles. When venturing into a new vernacular (he’s already worked in Greek, lodge and Shingle Style, to name a few), he steeps himself in its history. “I look back, not just a few years but hundreds of years.” Doing so, he says, is crucial to the integrity of the design. “I’m not a fan of big houses,” Appleton admits. “I’ll do them on occasion, but they require a lot of effort. A lot of times architects make a house larger without adjusting for the change in scale. When you look at classical estates, you see that they had a sense of decorum and scale that was understood much better by 19th- and early-20th-century architects than it is by architects today.”

Appleton’s current projects include renovating and adding on to the San Ysidro Ranch in Santa Barbara, the fabled California ranch-style hotel where John and Jacqueline Kennedy spent their honeymoon and Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh made their wedding vows. “We’re hoping people will be confused as to what’s old and what’s new,” says Appleton. “It’s easier to start a whole new project from scratch. It’s much more difficult to take something with a degree of history and do it justice.”

Marc Appleton

310-828-0430

www.appleton-architectom