The Gamble House: America's Ultimate Bungalow

In May 1907, David B. Gamble, a son of James Gamble, co-founder of the Procter and Gamble Company of Cincinnati, bought the largest parcel on Westmoreland Place, a private development overlooking the Arroyo Seco in Pasadena, and hired the local firm of Greene and Greene to build a winter home for himself and his wife Mary. Charles and Henry Greene were at the height of their powers, and the house they built in 1908 and 1909 is the fullest statement of their art: the ultimate bungalow, the work Americans point to when they want to show what the Arts and Crafts movement achieved at its peak, and the only Greene and Greene house open to the public that still contains all of the original furniture designed for it.

Every joint was drawn, every edge softened by hand. In this house the joinery is the ornament.

From the street the composition is low, broad and deliberately quiet. A traditional gabled elevation to the south is balanced by a deep terrace and a heavily timbered sleeping porch to the north, the two pulled together by one continuous horizontal line of deep eaves, exposed rafters and beams. The walls are split redwood shakes, the posts and beams Douglas fir, and the terraces sit behind retaining walls of clinker brick and pebbledash, with river stones, granite and a creeping fig rooting the building into its grassy knoll above the dry riverbed. A one room third level attic gives the mass its height. Nothing shouts. The house persuades by proportion, shadow and the visible pleasure taken in ordinary materials handled exceptionally well.

One continuous act of making

Everything in the house was designed as one continuous act of making. The brothers drew the architecture, the furniture, the light fixtures, the leaded art glass, the textiles and the rugs, even the fireplace tools and the picture hanging hardware, leather straps hung from picture rails, a craftsman signature. Inside, the panelling runs through Burmese teak in the entry hall and living room and Honduras mahogany in the dining room, with maple, oak and Port Orford cedar completing the palette. Every wood surface is softened, its edges rounded, so the joinery, pegged, splined and inlaid with contrasting wood, stone and metal, reads as ornament in its own right. One teak panel in the entry hall is a concealed, spring latch door to the kitchen; another opens a coat closet. The work was executed by a seasoned local team led by the furniture makers Peter and John Hall, who had built for the Greenes before and matched their standards.

Japanese architecture, which the Greenes had encountered as students and at the Japanese pavilion of the Chicago exposition of 1893 on their way west, shows throughout: in the broad eaves and post and beam clarity, in cloud and mist abstractions worked into doors, beams, screens and lanterns, and in a theme of three, elements grouped in threes, sometimes symmetrically and often not, that runs through the whole design. The broad entry doors carry their leaded glass in a natural motif, described by the house's own archive as a California live oak. Charles Greene would later give the method its name in print, calling it architecture as a fine art: execution treated as equal in importance to design, and beauty expected to arise from use honestly served.

The plan is organised around the California climate the house was built to enjoy. Rooms are arranged about a central hall, regularly shaped and almost traditional in themselves, but their scales keep shifting: ceiling heights differ between floors and rise again in the den, and the sequence loosens as it moves outward to second floor sleeping porches, open air rooms that period magazines promoted to health seekers wintering in Pasadena, and then to free form terraces front and rear. The rear terrace, with its patterned brick paving, planting beds and large curvilinear pond, is as much a room as any inside. Paths of water worn stones from the Arroyo Seco cross the lawns like dry brooks. It was a large house that refused monumentality, choosing instead the warmth of the bungalow raised to the level of fine art.

Survival and rediscovery

The Gamble family kept the house for nearly sixty years. David died in 1923 and Mary in 1929; her sister Julia lived on there until 1943, and Cecil and Louise Gamble took up residence in 1946. They briefly considered selling, until prospective buyers spoke of painting the interior woodwork white, at which point the plan was dropped. In 1966 the family gave the house to the City of Pasadena, in a joint agreement with the University of Southern California School of Architecture. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1971 and designated a National Historic Landmark on December 22, 1977. The house is still owned by the City of Pasadena and is operated today by the Gamble House Conservancy, open to the public for docent led tours.

Survival was not the same as fame. After the First World War the Greenes' costly, labour intensive manner fell from fashion, and through the 1930s and 1940s their work was largely ignored by critics. The revival came after the Second World War, led by House Beautiful editor Elizabeth Gordon and writer Jean Murray Bangs, who in 1950 presented the brothers as a vital link between Victorian excess and American modernism. In 1952 the American Institute of Architects gave them a special citation as sensitive and knowing builders of a new and native architecture for the western states. The Gamble House is the evidence that argument rests on: intact, unaltered and completely furnished, it survives as the most instructive house in America for anyone who believes, as the Greenes did, that a building should be honest in its construction, and that honesty, fully worked, becomes beauty.