On the western edge of one of Pasadena’s most architecturally complete Greene & Greene properties, set back from South Madison Avenue across a half-block of cultivated grounds, stands the Edward S. Crocker Guest Cottage. The cottage is a 1912 commission — the firm’s second commission for this property and the first specifically for Crocker, who had purchased the original house from Dr. S. S. Crow the year before. It was one of the firm’s earliest commissions of the Later Partnership era, and one piece of an unusually ambitious landscape program that would, over the next several years, transform the Crow property into the estate that Pasadena now knows as the Crow-Crocker House and grounds.
The estate’s main house sits on South El Molino Avenue, at number 979. The guest cottage and the western half of the property sit on South Madison Avenue, at number 980. Between them — across what was once a single lot and what Crocker doubled in 1911 by buying the parcel to the west of the original house — runs a sequence of gardens, pergolas, paths, pools, and walls, all of them designed by Greene & Greene as part of the 1912 commission. The guest cottage stands at the far end of that landscape, the most substantial individual structure of the western expansion.
The 1912 commission appears in the firm’s archive under a name slightly different from the one most commonly used today. The Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia catalogs it as “Grounds of Edward S. Crocker, Pasadena, Calif.” — eleven sheets in mixed media, dated 1912, and covering a stated subject matter of bungalows, houses, gardens, pergolas, garden walks, pools, garden walls, and fountains. The cottage is the bungalow. The rest is the setting Charles and Henry Greene drew around it.
The Original House
The estate’s main house was not commissioned by Crocker. It was commissioned in 1909 by Dr. S. S. Crow, who hired Greene & Greene to design a substantial Craftsman residence for a lot in the Oak Knoll district of Pasadena. Construction was completed in 1910. The Crow House — twenty-three sheets of drawings in the Avery archive, including detail drawings, reflected ceiling plans, site plans, interior elevations, and orthographic drawings — was a fully finished Greene & Greene residence in the firm’s Peak Period vocabulary. The house has four bedrooms and three bathrooms, a dramatic entry hall, a living room and dining room each with their own fireplace, glass French doors opening from the dining room to a front veranda, a hallway with a stained-glass skylight that leads through a central courtyard to the bedroom wing, a butler’s pantry, and the kind of finely detailed millwork — rare woods, double-pegged joints, handcrafted doors, wood paneling, and original hardware and light fixtures — that the firm produced when it was working at the height of its powers.
Dr. Crow occupied the house for slightly more than a year. In 1911, he sold it to Edward Savage Crocker, who was a different kind of client: a Pasadena resident with the resources and the inclination to expand what he had bought into a complete architectural compound. Crocker did not move into the house and leave it as he had found it. He moved into the house and immediately began enlarging the property around it.
The Crocker Acquisition
The most consequential thing Crocker did, in 1911, was to buy additional land to the west of the original lot. The acquisition effectively doubled the size of the property. Where Crow had owned a single building lot fronting on El Molino Avenue, Crocker now owned a parcel that ran from El Molino through to Madison Avenue, with the original house occupying the eastern half and the new western half open and available for development. What the western half lacked, in 1911, was buildings, gardens, walls, paths, pergolas, fountains, and pools. What it gained, over the next several years, was all of those things.
The architects Crocker hired to design the additions were the same architects who had designed the original house. He returned to Greene & Greene. There is no documentary evidence of him having considered any other firm. The firm produced, in 1912, the eleven-sheet set of drawings for the grounds of the expanded property — a set that included the guest cottage along with the full program of garden architecture that surrounded it. Whatever Crocker’s specific intentions were when he bought the western parcel in 1911, by the following year he had committed to a unified Greene & Greene compound that would treat the original house and the western expansion as a single, continuous architectural composition.
The 1912 Grounds Commission
The 1912 commission was unusual in the firm’s portfolio. Most Greene & Greene residential commissions were for a single building — house, or guest cottage, or garage — sometimes accompanied by a site plan or a garden study, but rarely involving the kind of integrated landscape program that the firm produced for Crocker. The eleven sheets of the 1912 set cover, in addition to the guest cottage itself: gardens (the planting and layout of the grounds), pergolas (the shaded structural elements that frame outdoor walks and seating areas), garden walks (the formal paths through the landscape), garden walls (the boundary and divider structures that organized the property’s outdoor spaces), pools (the water features that became part of the central courtyard and the western grounds), and fountains (the smaller water elements scattered through the landscape).
The drawings exist in the firm’s full range of media: ink drawings, crayon drawings, pencil drawings, ink wash drawings, watercolor wash drawings, blueprints, and blueline prints. The watercolor washes are unusual — the firm did not always render its drawings in color — and suggest that some of the 1912 sheets were presentation drawings, prepared for Crocker’s review with a level of finish above the ordinary working-drawing standard. The set is one of the most graphically varied and complete landscape commissions in the entire Greene & Greene archive.
The guest cottage itself, identified on the drawings as a bungalow, was the principal piece of new architecture in the program. It was designed to function as a separate complete dwelling — what real estate listings later in the property’s history would describe as a “separate complete guest house.” It is positioned on the western half of the property, near the Madison Avenue frontage, far enough from the main house to operate independently and close enough to remain part of the same architectural composition. Together with the main house, the courtyard, the pool, and the eventual six-car garage that the property would acquire, the guest cottage made the Crocker estate one of the most fully realized small compounds in Pasadena.
The Question of Authorship
The architectural authorship of the Crow-Crocker House and its associated structures has been the subject of scholarly disagreement. Two of the most authoritative guides to Los Angeles architecture, published a decade apart by the same authors, contradict each other on the point. The 1985 edition of Gebhard and Winter’s Architecture in Los Angeles: A Compleat Guide attributes the work entirely to Henry Greene — a Craftsman masterpiece, in the authors’ phrase, designed entirely by Henry. The 1994 edition of Los Angeles Architecture: The Guide by the same authors credits the work to Charles Greene completely. The reversal between the two editions is unexplained in the published record.
What can be said with more confidence is that the 1912 grounds commission, like most of the firm’s work during the formal partnership era, was a partnership commission — drawn collaboratively by both brothers, with whatever division of labor obtained internally not necessarily preserved in the surviving drawings. The Avery archive’s catalog identifies the 1912 work simply as Greene & Greene, Architects, without separating individual authorship. This site’s listing of the project follows the firm’s own attribution convention and treats the 1912 commission as a partnership work.
Whatever the internal division of labor, the result on the ground was a single coherent landscape program — gardens, walks, walls, pools, fountains, pergolas, and a guest cottage — produced by a firm working at the full height of its capacity, for an owner who clearly understood what he was buying and who was prepared to commit to the firm across multiple commissions.
The Crocker Compound
The 1912 grounds commission was not Crocker’s last interaction with the firm. Fifteen years later, in 1927, he returned again. The Avery archive contains three additional sheets, dated 1927 and rendered in graphite on tracing paper, identified as “Sketches of proposed alterations and additions to residence of Edw. S. Crocker, Pasadena.” The 1927 sheets indicate that Crocker, by then having lived on the property for sixteen years, was contemplating further changes — alterations or additions to the original 1910 main house — and that he was returning to Greene & Greene to design them, well into the firm’s Independent Years. By 1927 the formal partnership had been dissolved for five years, and the office that received Crocker’s commission was Henry Mather Greene, Architect — Henry’s solo practice on the Pasadena side. The 1927 sketches are evidence both of Crocker’s continued commitment to the firm and of the depth of the architect-client relationship that had been established eighteen years earlier when Dr. Crow first commissioned the original house.
The compound today, from the south side of the El Molino Avenue and the west side of the Madison Avenue lots, presents an almost complete record of the firm’s residential and landscape practice across nearly two decades. The 1909–1910 main house is by Greene & Greene. The 1912 grounds — gardens, pergolas, walls, pools, fountains, and the guest cottage — are by Greene & Greene. The 1927 alterations and additions, where executed, were by Henry Greene’s solo office. The six-car garage on the property dates from a similar period and reflects the firm’s continued involvement. The pool and the central courtyard, the brick walkway and the brick veranda, the stained-glass skylight in the central hall — all of these are Greene & Greene work, accumulated across multiple commissions and held together by the original architectural language that Charles and Henry established in 1909.
The Building’s Place in the Greene & Greene Story
The Edward S. Crocker Guest Cottage is, in the catalog of Greene & Greene work, a small-program residential building of 1912 — one of dozens of secondary structures the firm executed across its full career. It does not draw the attention of the Ultimate Bungalows, and it is not separately published in the major monographs on the firm. It is, on its own terms, a guest house at the back of a much larger property.
What gives the building its broader significance is the commission of which it forms a part. The 1912 grounds commission for Crocker is the firm’s most fully realized residential landscape program. Eleven sheets of drawings, covering bungalows and gardens and pergolas and garden walks and pools and garden walls and fountains. Watercolor washes among the rendering media. A site that began as a single house lot and was doubled by an owner specifically to accommodate the program. The guest cottage at the western edge of that landscape is the principal building of an architectural moment in which the firm was operating across the full range of design — building, site, structure, planting, water, masonry — for a single client.
It is also a reminder of the kind of long-term client relationship the firm sustained when it sustained one. Edward S. Crocker did not commission Greene & Greene once and move on. He bought a Greene & Greene house, expanded the property, commissioned them for the gardens and the guest cottage, and then commissioned them again sixteen years later for alterations to the main house. Across a span of years that began before the dissolution of the formal partnership and continued well into the Independent Years, Crocker was a Greene & Greene client. The compound he built is the documentary record of what that meant.
Quick Reference
- Location: 980 South Madison Avenue, Pasadena, California (the western, Madison Avenue frontage of the Crow-Crocker compound; main house at 979 South El Molino Avenue, on the eastern frontage)
- Date: Designed and built 1912
- Architects: Charles Sumner Greene and Henry Mather Greene (Greene & Greene partnership)
- Commission scope: the guest cottage as one element within a comprehensive grounds commission identified in the firm’s archive as “Grounds of Edward S. Crocker, Pasadena, Calif.” — eleven sheets of drawings covering the bungalow, gardens, pergolas, garden walks, pools, garden walls, and fountains
- Drawings preserved: 11 sheets in the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, in mixed media (ink, crayon, pencil, ink wash, watercolor wash, blueprint, and blueline print)
- Compound context: the original main house at 979 South El Molino was designed by Greene & Greene in 1909–1910 for Dr. S. S. Crow; Edward Savage Crocker purchased the property in 1911 and doubled its size by acquiring the parcel to the west; in 1927, Crocker commissioned Henry Greene’s solo practice for further alterations and additions to the main house
- Authorship note: the architectural authorship of the original Crow House has been variously attributed entirely to Charles or entirely to Henry by different scholars; the 1912 grounds commission is treated in the firm’s records as a partnership work
- Current status: Existing — the entire Crow-Crocker compound, including the guest cottage and surrounding grounds, remains intact as a complete Greene & Greene property
- Historic recognition: Edward S. Crocker Guest Cottage is separately listed on the City of Pasadena’s historic-properties record (the listing notes that the guest house was the firm’s work, with the main house separately credited)
Closing Reflection
There are Greene & Greene properties that exist as a single building on a single lot. There are Greene & Greene properties whose surrounding landscape was originally designed by the firm but has since been substantially altered, replanted, or rebuilt. There are very few Greene & Greene properties where the entire compound — main house, guest cottage, gardens, pergolas, walls, pools, fountains, paths, and the connections between all of them — was designed by the firm and survives as a single architectural composition.
The Crow-Crocker estate is one of those few. The guest cottage at 980 South Madison Avenue is the principal building at the back of that composition. It was drawn in 1912, when Charles and Henry Greene were both still in Pasadena and the firm’s full residential and landscape capacities were available to a client who was willing to use them. Edward S. Crocker was that client. He had bought the original 1910 main house from Dr. Crow with whatever Crow had left him; he doubled the property; he commissioned the firm to design what he wanted on the new ground; he commissioned them again, sixteen years later, when the original house needed altering. The compound is the architectural autobiography of an owner who made one consequential aesthetic decision very early — that he would build only with Greene & Greene — and stuck with it.
The guest cottage is a small building at the end of a long story. Together with the gardens and the pergolas and the walls and the pools and the fountains around it, and the great main house across the property, it is a piece of the most fully realized small compound the firm ever built.