I shot this striking house years ago for a landscape architect client who’d just finished redoing the entire yard. I had no idea at the time that I was standing in front of what one architectural historian would later call the single most extroverted example of its builder’s entire career.
The house is at 3553 28th Street, in San Diego’s historic North Park neighborhood. It was built in 1915 by David Owen Dryden, a largely self-taught builder who put up more than fifty Craftsman-style bungalows north and east of Balboa Park between 1911 and 1919.
Most architecture from that pre-“Great War” era in San Diego was handled by a small circle of trained professionals working on major commercial and civic projects, architects like Irving Gill, whose stunning Marston House still stands as one of the city’s landmark residences, and Harrison Albright, who designed the U.S. Grant Hotel and Spreckels Theatre in those same years. Dryden filled a gap underneath that tier. He was an independent contractor who built middle-class family homes, learned his craft informally from relatives in the lumber business back in Oregon, and never had any formal architectural training.
What he did have was a specific, recognizable style, and this house is where he pushed it furthest.
Professor Donald Covington (former professor of design in the art department at SDSU), who researched Dryden’s body of work for the Journal of San Diego History, singles out 3553 28th Street as Dryden’s most extroverted attempt at an oriental design mode, a style he notes was more common in Pasadena at the time than in San Diego. Look at my photo and you’ll see exactly what he means: pagoda-like trusses, upturned eave corners (“japonesque” in the parlance of the day), and heavily bracketed veranda columns stacked on brick piers.
Covington is honest about the effect too, noting the flourishes add much to the house’s exotic picturesque qualities but little to the integrity of its actual construction. Yep— the roofline is doing a lot of performing! It’s also exactly why the house is still worth photographing more than a century later.
The Carr House in North Park, San Diego
The house has a name, too, at least in the historical record: the Carr House, built for George and Anna Carr. George Carr was secretary of the Independent Sash and Door Company, a local supplier of fine doors, millwork, and art glass. Covington suspects the home's oak-and-beveled-glass doors and leaded cabinetry likely came straight from Carr's own stock. It sold to the Carrs for $6,550 in June of 1915 (about $218,000 in 2026 dollars). The lower floor’s gumwood paneling, according to Covington, is one of the best-preserved examples of that kind of interior woodwork left in any of Dryden's surviving houses. Sadly, I didn’t get to see inside on this job.
This was also Dryden's first house on 28th Street, and it set off the next three years of his career. He built his own family’s home nearby that same year and, from his own windows, could reportedly see the results of his work spreading in every direction. That corridor eventually became the North Park Dryden Historic District, formally recognized by the city in 2011. Only 20 of the district's roughly 136 homes are actually credited to Dryden by name. This is one of them, and arguably the showiest.
By the time I photographed it, the house had a new chapter. My client designed an entire front yard in drought-tolerant native plantings, river rock, and ornamental grasses, in place of a traditional lawn. That landscape architect was working during a real local push toward native, low-water landscaping, the same movement that got my own family to tear out our lawn and do the same thing. I like that detail! A 1915 house built to look exotic and theatrical now has a yard built around restraint and resourcefulness. Different decade, different values, same corner lot.
I didn't know any of this history when I set up my camera that day. I just knew the roofline was unlike anything else on the block and that the light was doing something nice to the brackets. Every once in a while, you get to photograph something that’s telling you a story you don’t even know yet.
Historical details on David Owen Dryden and the house at 3553 28th Street are drawn from Donald Covington, “David Owen Dryden,” The Journal of San Diego History, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Winter 1991), published by the San Diego History Center. Covington (1928-2002) was a Professor of Design at San Diego State University. The full article is available at sandiegohistory.org.
