Curated, edited, and co-designed by film star Diane Keaton, California Romantica features houses in the Spanish Colonial Revival style with photography taken specifically for the book. The book gives us the vision of a committed preservationist who fell in love with the Colonial-era and Spanish Colonial Revival architecture of Southern California as a girl.

Keaton puts it succinctly in her introduction: I knew I wanted to share the magic I’d felt within the aura created by the presence of Spanish architecture in Southern California … I wanted to focus on details, a fountain, a staircase, a doorway … I wanted the drama of light to reveal secrets that lay hidden beyond the facades … I wanted us to give renewed vitality … to the historic dream of living in a perfect California Spanish home.     

A testament to this vision, California Romantica is at once an invitation to wonder and an ode to an extraordinary tradition.