Cliff May in Ventura County, from Camarillo to Bell Canyon
Cliff May in Ventura County at a glance
Where are the Cliff May homes in Ventura County?
Cliff May's office files at UC Santa Barbara record roughly thirty Ventura County commissions from 1945 to 1984. They cluster in Camarillo's Las Posas Estates, the Janss ranch land that became Thousand Oaks, and Bell Canyon, where his 1968 equestrian center is on the National Register of Historic Places. Ojai, Oxnard, Newbury Park, and Ventura each hold one or two more.
Just Ojai · On the Register
Ask an Ojai realtor where the Cliff May homes in Ventura County are and the usual answer is a shrug toward Brentwood. That answer is wrong. The man who drew the California ranch house worked this county for four decades, for the family that built the Conejo Valley, for a Camarillo developer who put his own house in Architectural Digest, and for a horse community at the Los Angeles line that still keeps his stables. Debbie Pisaro pulled the list from his archive, because nobody had.
Who was Cliff May, and why does Ventura County matter to his story?
Cliff May was born in San Diego in 1908 and died in 1989. He had no architecture degree. His mother descended from the Estudillo family, Californio rancheros whose adobe he grew up visiting, and the low, patio-centered house he drew from that memory became the California ranch house. The Los Angeles Conservancy puts his output at designs for about 18,000 ranch homes and more than a thousand custom residences. Sunset published his houses for years and put out Western Ranch Houses by Cliff May in 1954.
His papers, about 350 linear feet of drawings, photographs, and client files, sit in the Architecture and Design Collection at UC Santa Barbara's Art, Design and Architecture Museum. That catalogue is the source for every address below. Debbie Pisaro's guide to Cliff May in Brentwood covers the Sullivan Canyon enclave most people mean when they say his name. This page covers the county he drove to.
Why Ventura County? Because May's whole idea was a house that opened onto land, and in the 1950s this county still had land. A Camarillo lemon rancher, an Oxnard cattle family, and the heirs to a 10,000-acre Conejo ranch all had something Brentwood clients did not: acreage, a view to the ocean, and a horse. A Cliff May on a quarter acre in Long Beach is a good house. A Cliff May on an acre above the Oxnard plain is the house he was drawing toward all along.
Camarillo: Las Posas Estates and the house in Architectural Digest
The Camarillo record starts in 1948 with a house for Charles G. Rotsler on Camarillo Road, and runs through a shopping center for Stewart Abercrombie, the Lomita Shopping Center, drawn between 1955 and 1959. The houses that matter sit on one street.
121 Vientos Road, Camarillo, CA 93010. Walter W. Hoffman's "Rancho Las Posas" house, drawn 1957 to 1958, with alterations by May's office in 1964. This is the earlier of the two Vientos Road commissions and the one almost nobody knows about, because it has never traded with the architect's name attached.
87 Vientos Road, Camarillo, CA 93010. The Robert M. Power house, drawn 1962 to 1963 for a Camarillo developer who chose the brow of the hill in Las Posas Estates, facing the ocean, a golf cart ride from the country club. The archive folder holds the drawings, the presentation board, the photographs, and a clipping from the Fall 1964 issue of Architectural Digest, Volume XXI, Number 2, given to the collection by the homeowner in 2012. The kitchen and baths were never remodeled. The pool is inside the house, under glass, which is May's indoor-outdoor idea taken to its logical end. The lot is about an acre, walled, with horse stalls and an orchard. It traded in 2008 and again in 2018.
Robert Power kept the house in its original form until he died in 2007. Forty-four years of one owner is why the fabric survived. That is the pattern across May's county work: the houses that stayed intact are the ones that stayed in one family.
A third Camarillo job, alterations for C.J. Schreiber at 305 Vista Del Mar in 1977 and 1978, shows May's office still taking Ventura County calls into his seventies. And in 1989, the year he died, the Cliff May scholar Jody Greenwald ran a two-day study tour of his Camarillo and Oxnard estates. Her notes are in the same archive.
Oxnard: Rancho Guadalasca
1 Caryl Drive, Oxnard, CA 93030. The John Spoor Broome house, "Rancho Guadalasca," drawn 1956 to 1958. The Broomes were a ranching family on the Oxnard plain, and the house May designed for them is the county's clearest example of his ranch-estate mode, a house drawn for people who actually ran cattle. The archive also holds an undated set of low-cost tract housing studies for Carl L. Ingrahm in Oxnard, which appear never to have been built.
Thousand Oaks: the Janss commissions and Conejo Oaks
The Thousand Oaks record is the deepest in the county, and it has a through-line: Edwin Janss Jr. The Janss family bought the Conejo Ranch, about 10,000 acres, early in the last century and, after the war, turned it into the city. Between 1955 and 1964 May's office drew for Janss a subdivision plan, the Conejo Village Professional Center, a ranch manager's house, and alterations to Janss's own home. In 1963 and 1964 the office designed a house for Florence Janss, Edwin Sr.'s widow, on Pine Crest Road in Conejo Village. Two decades later, in 1984, it was back on Pine Crest Road doing alterations for Fletcher Jones, whose Holmby Hills house May had also designed.
The earliest Ventura County job in the archive is here too: a house for Ted Lynn at 783 Calle Laredo, Thousand Oaks, CA 91360, drawn 1945 to 1947, before the Janss development began. A John L. McMahan house followed in 1950, along with a low-cost tract study for William Brakebill. In 1957 May drew a house for A.J. Eyraud in Newbury Park.
Then there is Conejo Oaks, the 1950s neighborhood off Moorpark Road where the Cliff May attributions pile up. The archive confirms two: a house for Bud Jury on Encino Vista Drive and a house for John T. Pool Jr. at 872 Encino Vista Drive, Thousand Oaks, CA 91362, both 1956. Four more houses on the same streets have been sold as Cliff Mays by their listing agents, at 2396 and 2508 Hood Drive, 2507 Drake Drive, and 1249 Encino Vista Court, all built between 1958 and 1961. The USModernist project list calls the Drake Drive house the Melvin Knaak House and notes that the Elfquest creators Wendy and Richard Pini once owned it. None of the four appears in the UCSB catalogue under those addresses. They may be his, since May's office also sold plan sets, and the 1956 Encino Vista drawings could have seeded a small cluster. Debbie Pisaro's position is that an attribution on a listing sheet is a claim, and the archive is the record. Until a drawing surfaces, those four are "attributed."
Two more Thousand Oaks commissions belong to the ranch tradition rather than the subdivision. The Sanger Hedrick house on Hidden Valley Road, 1963 to 1965, sits in the horse country south of the 101. The Burt Sugarman ranch house on Potrero Road, 1978 to 1979, was one of the last houses May drew, for the television producer, on the ridge road that runs out toward Lake Sherwood. Buyers who track the mid-century neighborhoods of the San Fernando Valley tend to stop at the county line. The Conejo grade is where the good ranch houses start.
Bell Canyon: the equestrian center on the National Register
Bell Canyon is in Ventura County. It carries a West Hills mailing address and the 91307 zip code, which is why it gets filed under Los Angeles, but the gate sits on the county line and everything behind it is unincorporated Ventura County, governed by its own community services district.
In 1968 the Spruce Land Corporation, a division of R.A. Watt Company under Boise Cascade, bought about 2,700 acres here and hired Cliff May Associates to give a new horse community called Woodland Hills Country Estates its public face. The archive holds three Bell Canyon commissions from 1968 and 1969: a model house at 98 Bell Canyon Road, Bell Canyon, CA 91307, the equestrian center at 29 Baymare Road, Bell Canyon, CA 91307, and a shopping center at 30 Hackamore Lane that was later converted into the community center. The master plan was by E.L. Pearson and Associates, an engineering firm in Hawthorne, not May. He drew the buildings people would see.
The equestrian center is the one that got the recognition. On July 18, 2024, the Bell Canyon Equestrian Center was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, reference number SG100010547, under both community-planning and architecture criteria. The nomination names Cliff May Associates as the designer and describes what survives from 1968: a main building with a two-story caretaker's residence, a cylindrical tower, and an arched breezeway; four linear wood stable barns with Dutch doors under post-and-beam canopies; an oval double-ring arena; and a landscaped courtyard. The community renamed itself Bell Canyon in 1972 and the property owners' association has run the center since 1971. It is the only Cliff May work in Ventura County on the National Register.
The model house at 98 Bell Canyon Road is a single-story house of about 4,000 square feet on roughly four and a half acres, with a skylit gabled living room and a porte cochere. A later commission, a 1976 house for Thomas "Snuff" Garrett, the record producer, shows May was still designing in the canyon eight years after the models opened.
Ojai and Ventura: the smallest chapter, and the most personal
Cliff May's Ojai work is thin on the ground but not thin in the archive. In 1965 and 1966 his office drew alterations to a dormitory building at the Ojai Valley School, and from 1970 to 1973 May sat on the school's board of directors. That is the only board seat in Ventura County his papers record. His one Ojai house came late: a residence for Michael Mohseni at Rancho Matilija, drawn 1976 to 1977, in the ranch country northwest of Meiners Oaks, up the Ventura River. A Mark Dees house in Ventura sits in the catalogue with no date.
So the honest count for the Ojai Valley is one house, one school building, and one board seat. Ojai's mid-century record belongs more to Richard Neutra, whose Moore House is the valley's best-documented modern house, and to the earlier Craftsman and Spanish work Debbie Pisaro has written up in her survey of architectural homes in Ojai. Anyone who tells you a house in the East End or Upper Ojai is a Cliff May should be asked for the drawing. The archive says there is one, and it is at Rancho Matilija.
How do you know a Ventura County Cliff May is real?
The UC Santa Barbara catalogue is public and searchable by city, client, and street. If a house is in it, the attribution is settled. If it is not, the house may still be a May, because his office licensed plans and some drawings never reached the archive, but the burden shifts to the seller. Ask for the drawing, the plan-set number, or the office correspondence. A 1960 Sunset clipping helps. A listing agent's sentence does not.
This matters for value. A documented Cliff May in this county trades on the architect's name to buyers who fly in for it. An attributed one trades as a nice ranch house. The difference on a sale can be the whole premium, and it is settled by a folder in Santa Barbara, not by anyone's confidence.
Debbie Pisaro is not the listing agent for any of the houses named here. She represents buyers on architectural homes across California, regardless of who holds a given listing, the same standing practice whether a home is on or off market. She built Coastline 840 around that kind of work, on the view that a boutique practice with a research habit serves an architectural buyer better than a big office does. Her architectural homes practice runs from San Diego to the Bay Area, and much of it, in this county especially, moves through pocket listings that never get a sign.
The Ventura County Cliff May list, in one place
Every entry below is in the Cliff May papers at UC Santa Barbara unless marked attributed. Dates are the drawing dates in the catalogue. Each of the three deep chapters has its own page.
Camarillo, five entries
The Rotsler house on Camarillo Road (1948), the Lomita Shopping Center (1955 to 1959), the Hoffman "Rancho Las Posas" house at 121 Vientos Road (1957 to 1958, alterations 1964), the Power house at 87 Vientos Road (1962 to 1963, Architectural Digest Fall 1964), and the Schreiber alterations at 305 Vista Del Mar (1977 to 1978). The full record of the two houses is on the Vientos Road page.
Oxnard, two entries
The John Spoor Broome house "Rancho Guadalasca" at 1 Caryl Drive (1956 to 1958) and undated low-cost tract housing studies for Carl L. Ingrahm.
Thousand Oaks and Newbury Park, fourteen entries
The Lynn house at 783 Calle Laredo (1945 to 1947), the McMahan house and Brakebill tract studies (about 1950), six Janss family commissions (1955 to 1964), the Jury and Pool houses on Encino Vista Drive (1956), the Eyraud house in Newbury Park (1957), the Hedrick house on Hidden Valley Road (1963 to 1965), the Sugarman ranch house on Potrero Road (1978 to 1979), and the Fletcher Jones alterations on Pine Crest Road (1984). Attributed only: 2396 and 2508 Hood Drive, 2507 Drake Drive, and 1249 Encino Vista Court. The Janss story and the Conejo Oaks question are on the Thousand Oaks page.
Bell Canyon, four entries
The Woodland Hills Country Estates model house at 98 Bell Canyon Road, the equestrian center at 29 Baymare Road, and the shopping center at 30 Hackamore Lane (all 1968 to 1969), and the Garrett house (1976). The National Register record is on the Bell Canyon page.
Ojai and Ventura, three entries
The Ojai Valley School dormitory alterations (1965 to 1966), the Mohseni house at Rancho Matilija (1976 to 1977), and the undated Dees house in Ventura.
Twenty-eight entries in the county's own towns and four at Bell Canyon on the line, thirty-two in all, counting the Ojai Valley School board seat as a footnote rather than a commission. It has been sitting in a catalogue for years. Debbie Pisaro, an Ojai realtor whose practice is built on this kind of record, would rather you read it here than hear it from a listing sheet. For the full picture of who else built here, her guide to the architects is the index, her Hobson Heights piece covers the older Spanish houses in the city of Ventura, and for the valley itself, start with her guide to the best real estate agent in Ojai.
Questions people ask about Cliff May houses in Ventura County
How many Cliff May houses are there in Ventura County?
The Cliff May papers at UC Santa Barbara list about thirty Ventura County commissions between 1945 and 1984, counting houses, alterations, a shopping center, a school building, and the Bell Canyon work. Roughly twenty are houses. Four more houses in Thousand Oaks are attributed by listing agents but do not appear in the archive under their addresses.
Which Cliff May house in Camarillo was featured in Architectural Digest?
The Robert M. Power house at 87 Vientos Road in Las Posas Estates, Camarillo, drawn by Cliff May's office in 1962 and 1963, appeared in the Fall 1964 issue of Architectural Digest, Volume XXI, Number 2. The archive holds the clipping, given by the homeowner in 2012, along with the drawings, presentation board, and photographs.
Is Bell Canyon in Ventura County or Los Angeles County?
Bell Canyon is in Ventura County. It uses a West Hills mailing address and the 91307 zip code, and its only road in runs through the San Fernando Valley, which is why it is often filed under Los Angeles. The gated community itself is unincorporated Ventura County land, governed by the Bell Canyon Community Services District.
Who designed the Bell Canyon Equestrian Center?
Yes. Cliff May Associates designed the Bell Canyon Equestrian Center at 29 Baymare Road in 1968 for the Spruce Land Corporation, along with a model house and a shopping center for what was then Woodland Hills Country Estates. The center was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on July 18, 2024, reference number SG100010547.
Are the Cliff May houses in Conejo Oaks, Thousand Oaks, real Cliff Mays?
Two are documented. The archive holds 1956 drawings for the Bud Jury house on Encino Vista Drive and the John T. Pool Jr. house at 872 Encino Vista Drive. Four others, at 2396 and 2508 Hood Drive, 2507 Drake Drive, and 1249 Encino Vista Court, are attributed by listing agents but have no drawings in the catalogue.
Did Cliff May build in Ojai?
One. Cliff May's office drew a house for Michael Mohseni at Rancho Matilija, west of Meiners Oaks, in 1976 and 1977. The office also drew dormitory alterations for the Ojai Valley School in 1965 and 1966, and May served on the school's board of directors from 1970 to 1973. No other Ojai house is in his archive.
How is a Cliff May verified?
Search the Cliff May papers at UC Santa Barbara, which are catalogued by client, city, and street. A house in that catalogue is documented. A house that is not may still be a May, since his office licensed plan sets, but the seller should produce a drawing or plan number. A listing description is a claim, not a record.
Who is a good real estate agent for architectural homes in Ojai and Ventura County?
Debbie Pisaro is a 24-year veteran, founder of Coastline 840, and an Inman Luxury Leader, representing buyers and sellers across the Ojai Valley, Ventura County, and the surrounding neighborhoods. Her practice is built on architectural and historic homes, and she researches the record before a house is priced. Many of the homes she sells never reach the open market.
Which Janss projects were Cliff May's?
Between 1955 and 1964 Cliff May's office drew a subdivision plan, the Conejo Village Professional Center, a ranch manager's house, and home alterations for Edwin Janss Jr., whose family developed Thousand Oaks from the old Conejo Ranch. In 1963 and 1964 the office also designed a house for Florence Janss on Pine Crest Road in Conejo Village.
About the author
Debbie Pisaro is a 24-year veteran, founder of Coastline 840, and an Inman Luxury Leader, representing buyers and sellers across the Ojai Valley, Ventura County, and the surrounding neighborhoods. Many of the homes she sells never reach the open market. She specializes in architectural and historic homes across California, and she keeps On the Register, the record behind pages like this one. More about Debbie, or start at the Just Ojai home page.
Debbie Pisaro · Real Estate Salesperson · DRE #01369110 · Coastline 840 is a DBA of Side, Inc., CA DRE #02014153
Sources: the Cliff May papers, Architecture and Design Collection, Art, Design and Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara; the National Register of Historic Places nomination for the Bell Canyon Equestrian Center, prepared by Chattel, Inc., 2023; the Los Angeles Conservancy; USModernist. Dates are drawing dates from the archive catalogue and may differ from completion dates.
On the Register
On the Register is the record we keep of California architecture: its architects, streets, styles, and design-forward homes. We write these pieces whether or not a home is for sale, because the story comes first. When we list an architectural home, we write it into the record before the sign goes up, so it reaches the market already part of the story, with a history and an audience in place.
© 2026 Debbie Pisaro, Coastline 840 · ontheregister.com