Spanish Courtyards: How to Tell Colonial From Revival

The fountain at San Antonio’s Spanish Governor’s Palace looks like evidence of an 18th-century patio. It was added in 1930. At St. Augustine’s Llambias House, the absence of a front door looks colonial because a 1954 restoration removed a later one. Casa del Herrero’s old Spanish and North African details sit inside a steel-reinforced 1920s house.

Two St. Augustine houses used the courtyard differently

Ximenez-Fatio and Llambias disprove the idea that Spanish Colonial houses followed one inward-facing plan. Ximenez-Fatio, built between 1797 and 1802, combined a grocery, tavern, billiard room, residence, and storage. Two doors opened directly from Aviles Street because the ground floor served public and commercial uses. Its rear garden held a detached kitchen, well, privy, and wash shed.

Llambias was domestic rather than commercial. Its restored 1780s plan has no street-facing entrance: a gate in the coquina garden wall leads around to the south-facing rear porch and then into the house. That porch used winter sun and southeast summer breezes while avoiding colder north winds.

The visible Llambias arrangement is itself a preservation decision. A direct front door had been added in the late 19th century, then closed during the 1954 restoration; the courtyard kitchen, service building, and well are reconstructions from the same campaign. Ximenez-Fatio operates as a guided house museum. Llambias is used primarily for meetings and special events, so it should not be planned as an equivalent daily interior tour.

The Spanish Governor’s Palace preserves a 1930 idea of 1722

The name is the first warning. The building was the comandancia—the residence and office of the captain of the Presidio San Antonio de Béjar—not a governor’s palace. Original rubble stone and adobe survive, along with a 1749 keystone bearing the arms of Ferdinand VI. A glass panel in the Captain’s Office exposes early adobe that visitors can inspect directly.

The romantic courtyard tells a different date. Its fountain, well, garden, and covered portales belong to architect Harvey P. Smith’s 1929–1930 restoration. Smith also added two salon fireplaces and invented a “Child’s Bedroom.” Swiss woodcarver Peter Mansbendel made the elaborate entrance doors for the same campaign. The 18th-century courtyard had instead been divided into utilitarian work areas with an outdoor kitchen.

The city museum therefore preserves two subjects at once: an 18th-century military residence and San Antonio’s 1930 vision of a refined Spanish past.

Casa del Herrero is authentically 1920s Revival

Casa del Herrero was designed by George Washington Smith between 1922 and 1925 as George Fox Steedman’s winter estate. Its steel-reinforced concrete frame and hollow-tile infill enclosed imported Spanish and European antiquities. More than 17,000 new tiles were custom-made in Tunis for the estate, while metalwork and other architectural details were fabricated for the new building.

The outdoor sequence begins with an S-curving drive into an auto court centered on an octagonal tiled fountain. South of the house, water channels connect two garden fountains; east of the living room, one walled Moorish garden opens through an arched wall into another garden ending at a tiled wall fountain. These courts were composed as 1920s garden rooms rather than recovered from a colonial homestead.

Casa del Herrero is accessible by reservation, with guided house-and-garden options rather than unrestricted entry. Its tiles and fountains are not misleading because the estate does not claim to be an 18th-century house: they are original evidence of a remarkably intact 1920s patron-and-designer collaboration.