Architect brothers Charles Sumner Greene and Henry Mather Greene, educated at MIT and apprenticed in Boston, moved to Pasadena, California, and there shed their neo-Colonial and Queen Anne motifs to explore the possibilities of a true craftsman built home.
This came after a trip to England by Charles in 1901; he brought back Arts & Crafts ideals a decade before the movement might have reached the West Coast. The brothers took an artistic leap, attempting to synthesize the best of many worlds into a new California vernacular: the adobe and Mission forms of the region, the rugged Shingle Style of Richardson in the Northeast, and the Italian and Japanese architecture they had studied.
The Greenes picked the chalet, a folk carpenter’s dream, as their base. Charles Greene rejected revival styles in favor of a type inspired by Japanese timber-frame construction.
Their goal, writes Arts & Crafts historian Bruce Smith, was “to develop a singular style of architecture appropriate to California’s climate and lifestyle...massive pilings of arroyo stone and clinker brick, Japonesque lanterns, verandahs and pergolas, open courtyards and shaded porches, and low-pitched rooflines with rafter tails.”
Their “ultimate bungalows” include the Gamble House (a museum), the Blacker House, and the Thorsen residence. The firm spanned the years 1894–1922. Much credit for the woodwork—finely proportioned, with elaborate joinery—belongs to the architects’ collaborators Peter Hall, a builder, and his brother John Hall, who ran the millworks shop.
Patricia Poore is Editor-in-chief of Old House Journal and Arts & Crafts Homes, as well as editorial director at Active Interest Media’s Home Group, overseeing New Old House, Traditional Building, and special-interest publications.
Poore joined Old House Journal when it was a Brooklyn-brownstoner newsletter in the late 1970s. She became owner and publisher and, except for the years 2002–2013, has been its editor. Poore founded the magazines Old-House Interiors (1995–2013) and Early Homes (2004–2017); their content is now available online and folded into Old-House Journal’s wider coverage. Poore also created GARBAGE magazine (1989–1994), the first unaffiliated environmental consumer magazine.
Poore has participated, hands-on, in several restorations, including her own homes: a 1911 brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and a 1904 Tudor–Shingle Style house in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where she brought up her boys and their wonderful dogs.
