The eldest of four brothers, Aubrey Fleetwood St. Clair was born in Malden, Massachusetts on July 18, 1889 to Norman and Ann Elizabeth St. Clair. The family had relocated to Pasadena, California by the mid-1890’s. His English born father was artistic by nature and worked in architecture, illustration, and painting. Norman St. Clair is considered one of the very first members of the Laguna Beach artist community, painting in that town by 1904.

Aubrey attended the Los Angeles Military High School before graduating from Pasadena High School in 1907. He developed an interest in architecture and between 1909 and 1912 interned with Norman Marsh, the seminal Pasadena firm of Greene and Greene, and the prolific Pasadena architect Reginald Johnson. He embarked on a six-month trip to England in 1912 and while in Britain he studied at Battersea Polytechnic Institute in London. He traveled in Britain and France on this visit and his love of traditional English residential architecture only deepened. The style would figure prominently in his design career.

Aubrey was back in Pasadena by the end of 1912. On July 10, 1913 he married Eudora “Dolly” Graham (1892-1970). The couple had four children, Aubrey Graham (1916-1919), Alice Ann (1919-1954), Norman Ross (1920-1997), and Gordon Graham (1924-2001).

In the period 1913-1917 Aubrey worked as an apprentice draftsman for firms such as Edward Borgmeyer, Eager & Eager, Irvine Gill, Foss Designing and Building, and the Pasadena Department of Water and Engineering.

The United States joined the First World War in April 1917. Like millions of other Americans, Aubrey registered for the selective service on June 15, 1917. His draft registration card describes him as tall and slender with brown hair and gray eyes. As both a husband and a father, he was deemed excluded from call up for active military duty in the war. Rather, he spent the war years working as a draftsman for the Hammond Lumber Company in Samoa, California and for the Bay Point Shipbuilding Company. By 1919 he was back in Pasadena.

Aubrey was employed by the J.H. Woodworth & Son architecture firm after the war. He worked in the office of Wallace Neff in 1923 and later joined the prominent Pasadena firm Marston and Maybury where he worked for several years. His earliest known commission was for the Morris Jones residence at 1250 N. Holliston in Pasadena, constructed in 1924. Mr. Jones was the director of the Pasadena Department of Water and Engineering and may have known Aubrey from his employment in that office a decade earlier. In January 1929, he established his own office.

In the late-1920’s he was working in both Pasadena and Laguna Beach. His first commission in Laguna Beach was for the commercial building at Main Beach that housed Las Ondas Café. The following year he designed the city’s beautiful Spanish Colonial Water District Building. In 1935 Aubrey, Dolly and their children moved to Laguna Beach. Aubrey established his office in the Builders’ Guild at 1191 South Coast Hwy. in a structure he designed for the Smith Construction Company. He designed dozens of commercial and residential projects in Laguna Beach over a career that spanned five decades. Several of his projects were featured in Architectural Digest and Sunset Magazines. Aubrey St. Clair died on May 2, 1968.