Sam & Alfreda Maloof Compound, 9553 Highland Avenue, Rancho Cucamonga, San Bernardino County, CA

Significance: The property is the home, shop, and studio of Sam Maloof, internationally acclaimed woodworker and furniture designer, and, until her death in late 1998, his wife and partner Alfreda Ward Maloof, a former Santa Fe Indian School Arts and Crafts Directory. Sam Maloof began making furniture on this site in then rural Alta Loma in the early 1950s and rose to prominence over the next four decades as perhaps the greatest living American woodworker. During that time, he also designed and built a house, studio, and guesthouse on the property. A number of major American museums hold his furniture in their collections and he has been the subject of many film and television productions and the subject of books and scores of articles. Sam has received numerous awards, among the most prominent being the first recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant for the Craftsman Apprentice Program (1969) and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (1985). In 1990, the site was determined eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places under Criteria B and C, employing the rarely used exception for sites associated with living persons and under fifty years of age. Sam Maloof, his career, impressively consistent body of work and pure esthetic, and the key relationship all of this has to the environment in which he worked and continues to work, met the exception threshold like few other properties ever have. There are no other sites associated with Sam and his creative life except this property. California Department of Transportation Architectural Historians Bonnie W. Parks and Aaron A. Gallup in 1990 found it to be "unique to its builder, and the world, and ... of exceptional artistic merit."
Survey number: HABS CA-2708