STRUCTURES : DESIGN HOUSE : Built-In Diversity : The Ventura Symphony fund-raiser features a dazzling structure by architect Roy Wilson Sr.

For 10 years now, the Ventura Symphony has relied on its Design House as a principal fund-raising effort. Open to the curious public May 2 through 31, the event turns out to be one of the more multimedia concepts of the cultural calendar, a fiscal boon for the symphony and a rare public showcase for a selection of 25 Ventura County-based interior and landscape designers.

Voyeurs, future customers and other looky-loos can indulge their whims, shamelessly, while supporting a worthy cause.

In addition, the Design House this year has an historical/architectural subtext, in that the house is one of the more dazzling pieces of handiwork by the late Santa Paula-based architect Roy Wilson Sr.

Built in 1929 for Arthur and Eva Walden and now owned by Greg Finseth and his wife, Jean MacDonald, the house is a remnant of another era, another mentality.

Wilson was a prominent architect who built many homes here in the early decades of this century, when Santa Paula was a burgeoning oil and citrus town. Among his projects was the posh, rambling Teague House up on McKevitt Heights Road.

That massive structure, a European manor house of brick, wood and stucco, sits aristocratically perched over a green promenade of lawn. The house peers over a town that has changed much since the house and its gardens went up 70 years ago.

The first house to be erected on the then-bare subdivision, it still exists as Santa Paula’s proverbial “House on the Hill.” Not surprisingly, Hollywood has come knocking, shooting scores of films on the property--the latest of which was the Chaplin biopic “Charlie.”

The Walden home is several blocks away, on Foothill Road, and was built seven years later than the Teague House. But it is different in virtually every way.

From the outside, the Colonial-style house boasts a kind of classic solidity that’s refreshingly out of step with the suburban tracts surrounding it and the extended neighborhood.

Santa Paula is a safe harbor for numerous vintage Victorian and Craftsman houses, as well as other variations on European-based genres and revivals. Yet the foursquare look of the Colonial style stands apart. Visions of “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dreamhouse” dance in our heads.

In fact, the house is less than it might have been. It was built on the cusp of the Great Depression, and the plan’s original grandeur--a row of columns on the front facade, for instance--was scaled back to a more modest, cost-saving design. On the far wall of the living room, two doors intended to lead to a never-finished sun porch stand dormant, without function, a testament to the effects of hard times.

On the other hand, the Teague House, circa 1922, may represent the spoils of prosperity and optimism: Owner C. C. Teague went on to make Limoneira, the lemon ranch, into the world’s largest single lemon producer.

Traipsing through the many rooms that make up the Design House can be an adventure in diversity, like rifling through an issue of “Architectural Digest” in real space. A varied sampler of design ideas, the spaces differ from each other but remain true to a largely traditional approach, in keeping with the Colonial design.

In the dining room, Halina Kowalski glazed the walls deep red, and gave the dining room a generally dark, romantic air. A backlighted gong by the table adds an element of exotica. Meanwhile, the living room according to the Ojai-based Bobbi Dufau is a brightly colored space, taking its cues from a vibrantly colored rug.

Upstairs, Elizabeth Mulchay, with an office in Camarillo, has radically altered the once-unfinished game room-library. Using existing antique mahogany pillars from 1870, she has built an extensive library with dyed wood to match.

Deep red textured walls and embossed wallpaper on the ceiling contributes to the atmosphere she calls “masculine yet whimsical.”

Maraya and Tim Droney also relied on construction for their task--to create a master bath and dressing room from a bare closet space. Jone Pence and Paul Morse also changed the physical space of their assignment, the master bedroom, adding crown molding.

One of the revised house’s small but intriguing spaces is the illusionistic Greco-Roman powder room that Barbara Legacy has fashioned and painted out of a once innocent, unused niche of the house.

Veteran Design House participant Carolyn E. Purdy, the Ventura-based designer who elaborated on a floral motif in the house’s morning room--a breakfast nook--extolled the virtues of the project.

“Design House is a great forum for designers in the county. People still comment on the master bedroom I did 10 years ago.”

As for the exterior, the dramatic, porticoed “front” facade, which is now to the rear of the house, facing Foothill Road--is lined with dormer windows. Like the Teague House, its orientation is downward, toward the valley the town lined itself along.

At present, the Teague house is empty and in less than pristine condition, but you still get a feeling for its aura of haughty elegance. An in-house elevator has been painted with a trompe l’oeil effect to depict a view of the house from the gazebo. Concrete arches ennoble the entryways on the main floor. Ornately turned wood trails up the staircase.

But the main attraction, in a contextual sense, is the view from the south-facing side of the house, and all that it represents. On a clear day, you can see the Walden house and the verdant valley below. The rest of the civic landscape slowly, steadily filled in over the span of time.

* WHERE AND WHEN

Design House, 720 Foothill Road, Santa Paula, May 2-31, open Wednesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and Sunday, noon to 4 p.m. Admission $12.