Set on the south slope of the Riviera, on a lot that drops steeply away from the street, the Nathan Bentz House at 1741 Prospect Avenue presents two distinct architectural experiences. From Prospect Avenue, looking south, the building reads as a two-story Craftsman residence — shingled, gabled, modest in scale, half-screened by mature landscaping. From the south, where the ground falls away toward Olive Avenue, the same building rises three stories, the lower level hidden from the street and opening to garden and view. The transition is the work of an architect who understood the lot before he began drawing.
The architect was Charles Sumner Greene, working in 1911 from the Greene & Greene office in Pasadena. The contractor was Isaac Hardy, a Santa Barbara builder, working from Charles’s drawings in the spring and summer of that year for a build cost of approximately five thousand dollars. The client was Nathan Bentz — international dealer in Japanese and Chinese antiquities, fifty-year resident of Santa Barbara, and, as it would turn out, the only client who would ever commission Greene & Greene to build in his city. The Nathan Bentz House remains, more than a century later, the only Greene & Greene work in Santa Barbara. It is also among the city’s most quietly distinguished examples of the Craftsman house.
Architectural Description
The house is composed of three interlocking rectangular volumes, capped by moderately-pitched side and front gable roofs whose rafters project beyond the eaves in the manner the firm had refined across the Peak Period commissions in Pasadena. The walls are clad in wood shingle. Triangular braces — visible from below — support the gable ends. Triple windows of varying dimension serve as the dominant fenestration, letting daylight enter the principal rooms in carefully proportioned groups of three.
The most characteristic detail, particular to Greene & Greene, is on the main wing: a partially cantilevered second floor, projecting outward over the first, its weight carried by shingled volutes — spiraling scrolls of cedar shingle that hold the load and give the cantilever its visual logic. The volute is an old Greek detail, used at the head of the Ionic column. In the hands of Charles Greene it becomes Craftsman. The same morphology, built in cedar shingle, doing the work of a bracket. It is the kind of detail that rewards the second look — the kind of detail that, in retrospect, signs a building.
The driveway entrance from Prospect Avenue is embellished with a pergola of wood and brick — the materials repeating the language of the house, the proportions echoing its modesty. A small one-story building flanks the pergola, originally a garage, now converted to a separate dwelling on the lot. The south elevation, facing toward Olive Avenue, was almost certainly the original principal facade. It is the side of the building that faced the view, that received the southern light, that opened to the garden. It is from this side that the building’s full three stories are visible, and it is from this side that the architecture reads most fully.
The Client
Nathan Bentz arrived in Santa Barbara in 1891, after a decade of apprenticeship in San Francisco. He had been born and raised in upstate New York; he had spent a brief period in South Dakota; he had settled in San Francisco in 1881 and taken work with Horace Fletcher, one of the city’s distinguished antiques dealers, who specialized in Japanese items and who, in another corner of his life, had developed a national reputation as a dietary reformer. Bentz spent ten years with Fletcher, absorbing the trade. When he opened his own business in Santa Barbara, he opened it as an importer of Asian art and antiquities — a specialty he would refine for the rest of his life.
In 1896, Bentz made his first buying trip to China and Japan. The journey, undertaken by steamship across the Pacific, was a major undertaking for any American at the turn of the century; for Bentz, it became almost an annual one. Over the next four decades he would travel repeatedly to Asia, returning with ceramics, scrolls, lacquerware, sculpture, and, in particular, the porcelain in which he eventually became internationally recognized as an expert. He traveled through Europe as well, often using European dealers as middlemen for items difficult to source directly. In 1911 — the year he commissioned the house — the local Santa Barbara newspaper described a collection of Japanese art gems he had brought back from a recent trip, valued at nearly seventy thousand dollars.
By that point his Santa Barbara store had succeeded sufficiently that he and his brother Philip had opened additional branches in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Bentz’s clientele was national in scope; his contacts were international. He was, by 1911, a major figure in the cultural life of Santa Barbara, and he would remain so for the next thirty years. He died of a heart attack in 1943. His brother Philip came down from San Francisco to run the store for two more years and then closed it for good.
The Commission
The connection between Nathan Bentz and the Greene brothers ran through Nathan’s older brother John, also an art dealer, and also a Greene client. John Bentz had commissioned the firm in 1901 for a retail building, and again in 1906 for his own residence in Pasadena. By the time Nathan was ready to build in Santa Barbara, he had spent years observing his brother’s house and the firm’s other work, and he had been struck — particularly — by the firm’s incorporation of Japanese architectural elements: the joinery, the proportions, the relationship between roof and wall, the careful attention to the wood itself. For a man who had spent a quarter century selling Japanese art to American collectors, this was not a stylistic curiosity. It was a recognizable language.
The choice of Charles Greene to lead the design follows logically. By 1911, Charles was the partner most engaged with the Asian decorative tradition; his hand on the Ultimate Bungalows had given those buildings their characteristic blend of American Craftsman timber framing and Japanese spatial sensibility. The Bentz commission gave him a client who could read what he was doing. There would have been no need to explain why the rafters project, why the gables are braced, why the volutes hold up the cantilever, why the windows are triple. The client knew.
The result is a house built — as the spring 1911 contract specified, and as Isaac Hardy completed it — for five thousand dollars. The figure is modest by the standards of the Ultimate Bungalows. The Gamble House, four years earlier, had cost roughly fifty thousand. But the Bentz House was a different commission: a smaller program, on a more compact lot, for a client whose money was tied up in inventory rather than in house. What Charles Greene gave Nathan Bentz, for five thousand dollars, was the firm’s full architectural attention — at the scale the budget allowed, with no detail conceded.
A Century on the Riviera
Nathan Bentz lived in the house for the rest of his life. The Santa Barbara city directories list him as the owner from 1911 through 1940. After his death in 1943, the house passed through subsequent owners and, at some point in the later twentieth century, was converted to a multiple-unit residence — a not-uncommon fate for large early-twentieth-century houses on the California coast.
The conversion did not, however, result in extensive alterations to the exterior. The house retains, by all accounts, almost all of its character-defining features and original construction materials. The arcaded brick pergola on the south elevation has been enclosed; the roof has been replaced; the garage on Prospect Avenue has been converted to a dwelling. But the shingled volutes are still there. The cantilevered second floor is still there. The triple windows, the triangular braces, the projecting rafters, the three interlocking volumes — all there. The integrity of the building is, in the assessment of the city’s preservation surveys, excellent.
The house is on the Santa Barbara Potential List of Historic Resources. It has been identified as eligible for designation as a City of Santa Barbara Landmark, for listing in the California Register of Historic Resources, and for listing on the National Register of Historic Places. None of these designations have yet been formalized. The house holds them, for now, in waiting.
The Building’s Place in the Greene & Greene Story
The Nathan Bentz House occupies an unusual position in the Greene & Greene canon. It is not a major commission. It does not appear on the standard tours. It is rarely mentioned in the same breath as the Gamble House or the Blacker House. And yet it carries something the great houses do not: the only Greene & Greene presence in Santa Barbara, the only Greene & Greene client who specifically valued the firm for its Asian sensibility, and one of the clearest examples in the firm’s portfolio of a small-budget commission executed without compromise.
There are larger Greene & Greene houses, more famous Greene & Greene houses, and more public Greene & Greene houses. There is no other Greene & Greene house in Santa Barbara, and there will not be one. Nathan Bentz, who knew exactly what he was buying, bought the only one.
Quick Reference
- Location: 1741 Prospect Avenue, Santa Barbara, California
- Date: Designed and built 1911
- Architect: Charles Sumner Greene (Greene & Greene partnership era)
- Contractor: Isaac Hardy (Santa Barbara)
- Construction cost: approximately $5,000 (1911)
- Style: Craftsman
- Construction: wood frame, shingle clad
- Composition: three interlocking rectangular volumes; two stories from Prospect Avenue, three stories from the south
- Distinctive feature: partially cantilevered second floor supported by shingled volutes
- Original ownership: Nathan Bentz, 1911–1940
- Distinction: the only Greene & Greene work in Santa Barbara
- Current status: existing, converted to multiple-unit residence; exterior integrity excellent
- Historic recognition: Santa Barbara Potential List of Historic Resources; identified as eligible for City Landmark, California Register, and National Register designations
Closing Reflection
There is something particular about a building that exists in only one example in its city. Santa Barbara, by 1911, had its own architectural traditions — the Mission Revival, the Spanish Colonial, the early stirrings of the regional vernacular that would dominate the city after the 1925 earthquake. None of those traditions are visible at 1741 Prospect Avenue. The Bentz House is a Craftsman house of the Pasadena school, transplanted to the Riviera, and it remains, after a century, exactly that.
Nathan Bentz died in 1943. His store closed two years later. The Asian collection he had assembled across half a century was dispersed. The Pasadena firm that had designed his home dissolved its formal partnership in 1922 and ceased to exist as Greene & Greene during the Independent Years that followed. What remained — what remains — is the building.
Cedar shingle weathers. The volutes still hold up the cantilever. The light still falls on the south elevation in the long Pacific afternoons. It is the only Greene & Greene house in Santa Barbara, and it is, on its own quiet terms, one of the firm’s most affecting works.