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Greene & Greene

The Kate A. Kelly House

North Aberdeen Avenue runs uphill from the flatlands of Los Feliz toward the Hollywood foothills, in a quiet residential stretch where the houses sit on substantial lots and the street trees grow large. At 2550, set back behind an iron gate and a screen of mature landscaping that has been allowed, over decades, to grow toward maturity, stands a Spanish Colonial Revival estate of approximately six thousand square feet on three quarters of an acre. The house was designed in 1921 by Henry Mather Greene, working from the Greene & Greene office in Pasadena, in the closing year of the formal partnership and at the height of his autonomous Pasadena practice. The client was Mrs. Kate A. Kelly. The connection that brought the commission into the firm’s office was the most consequential single client relationship of Henry Greene’s later career: Earle C. Anthony, California’s sole Packard distributor and the firm’s longest-sustained commercial and residential patron, was Kate A. Kelly’s son-in-law, and the Aberdeen Avenue house was built for his wife’s mother.

The Kelly House is, in architectural style, Spanish Colonial Revival. There is no shingle, no clinker brick foundation, no Craftsman porch detail, no projecting timber rafter. The vocabulary is the white-stuccoed, tile-roofed, French-doored, walled-terrace vocabulary that came to define the most ambitious Southern California residences of the early 1920s, when Spanish Revival was moving into its first major peak in Los Angeles. The plan opens to the outdoors. The living room has a soaring vaulted ceiling with exposed beams. French doors lead from the principal rooms to walled terraces and gardens. The interior, even after a century of subsequent ownership and modification, retains the proportional relationships and the indoor-outdoor flow that the firm had been developing across two decades of California practice — translated, in the Aberdeen Avenue commission, into the Spanish Revival language that Henry Greene was prepared to work in when the program asked for it.

Henry Greene in 1921

By 1921, the Greene & Greene partnership had been operating in name only for several years. Charles Sumner Greene had been in Carmel-by-the-Sea since 1916. His architectural practice had become a Carmel-based studio focused on the Monterey Peninsula and a small set of clients elsewhere. The Pasadena office continued under the partnership name, but the day-to-day work of the practice — the residential commissions in Pasadena, the Los Angeles area, and beyond — was Henry’s. The formal dissolution of the partnership would come in 1922, the year after the Kelly House. The HMG attribution that appears in the firm’s record of the Kelly commission identifies it specifically as Henry’s work, consistent with the documentary pattern of his late-partnership and solo-practice production.

The Kelly House was, in this respect, one of the last residences Henry Greene executed under the Greene & Greene firm name before the partnership formally dissolved. The Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University holds, among the firm’s records, a separate set of drawings for later alterations and additions to the same Aberdeen Avenue residence — drawings that are explicitly signed “Henry M. Greene, Architect,” reflecting the post-1922 solo practice rather than the partnership. The two sets of drawings, taken together, document a sustained architect-client relationship: Henry designed the original house in 1921, and he continued to work for Mrs. Kelly through the alteration commissions that followed.

The choice of Spanish Colonial Revival, like the Colonial brick of the 1917 Mundorff House in Fresno or the Classical Revival of the 1911 Longfellow Elementary School, was a deliberate stylistic adaptation rather than a default. Henry Greene had spent twenty years working primarily in the Craftsman vocabulary that defined the Ultimate Bungalows, but he was capable, by 1921, of executing a fully realized residence in any of several other styles when the client and the program supported it. The Kelly commission supported Spanish Colonial Revival. The result was a building that fit its neighborhood, fit the moment in Southern California architectural fashion, and fit what the client was prepared to live in.

Mrs. Kate A. Kelly

Census records preserve a clear picture of the household at 2550 North Aberdeen Avenue in 1930, nine years after the house was completed. Kate A. Kelly was sixty-seven years old, a widow, the owner and head of household. She had been born in California — a notable distinction in her generation, as native-born Californians of any class were rare in the late nineteenth century — to a father born in Nova Scotia and a mother born in Ireland. The 1930 census recorded her as “not working.” The house was valued at thirty thousand dollars, which placed it among the more valuable residences in Los Feliz at the time.

She did not live alone. Her sister, Jennie Macken — sixty-nine years old, single, also California-born — lived with her in the house, as did a domestic servant, Inez Rutherford, a thirty-one-year-old single woman from North Carolina who worked as the household’s servant. The arrangement was characteristic of the era: an older widowed woman of means, sharing her substantial residence with an unmarried sister and supported by a single live-in domestic worker, in a neighborhood that was itself becoming one of Los Angeles’s most exclusive residential quarters.

The 1921 commission of the house, when Mrs. Kelly was approximately fifty-eight, was the primary architectural decision of her later life. She would live in the house for the rest of her years, through the alterations that Henry Greene continued to design after the partnership’s dissolution, and through the long maturation of the Aberdeen Avenue landscape that gradually screened the property from the street. The house she commissioned in 1921 was the house she occupied for the remainder of her life.

The Earle C. Anthony Connection

The architectural commission for Mrs. Kelly’s house did not arrive at the Greene & Greene office by chance. Kate A. Kelly was the mother-in-law of Earle C. Anthony, who was, by 1921, the firm’s most sustained personal patron. Anthony’s relationship with the firm dated to 1909, when he commissioned Greene & Greene to design his own residence in Beverly Hills. In 1911, he had hired the firm again to design the showroom interior, entrance, and exterior details of his Packard automobile dealership at 1000 South Hope Street in downtown Los Angeles — the building that would, over the next decade, become the home of his pioneering radio station KFI and one of the recognized landmarks of automotive Los Angeles. By 1921, when his mother-in-law commissioned the Aberdeen Avenue house, Anthony’s connection to Greene & Greene was a decade old. By 1922, the year after the Kelly commission, Anthony would commission the firm again — this time, working through Mrs. Norman Kerry, for the relocation of his original 1909 Beverly Hills house to a new lot on Bedford Drive. Across more than a decade of his life, in commercial, residential, and family commissions alike, Anthony returned consistently to Henry Greene’s office.

The Kelly commission was therefore not an isolated commission. It was an integrated piece of an ongoing architect-client relationship that spanned multiple buildings, multiple programs, and multiple decades. The Kelly House was the building Anthony commissioned for his wife’s mother, on a lot in Los Feliz, with the same architect who had designed his own Beverly Hills residence and his Hope Street showroom. Whatever architectural quality was being purchased — and the Kelly House is, by every available account, of exceptional architectural quality — was being purchased on the basis of a relationship that Anthony had been building with the firm since 1909.

Anthony’s continued patronage of Greene & Greene through this period is itself a piece of the firm’s history that has not been adequately documented in the published literature. He was, in the late partnership years and into Henry’s solo practice, the firm’s most consequential single client. The Kelly House is part of that record.

The House Today

The Kelly House survives intact at 2550 North Aberdeen Avenue. Over the course of the twentieth century, it passed through a series of subsequent owners. In 1949, Doug and Eunice Goodan — Doug being the grandson of Harry Chandler, the longtime publisher of the Los Angeles Times and one of the most consequential figures in early-twentieth-century Los Angeles — purchased the property after their marriage and lived there for many decades. Doug Goodan would later write about Los Feliz for the local press, including a piece titled “A Lifetime in Los Feliz” published in the summer 1991 issue of the Los Feliz Observer. He was, by his own account, a Los Feliz lifer, and the house at 2550 Aberdeen was the center of his and Eunice’s family life for more than half a century.

The property remained in the Goodan family until well into the twenty-first century. When it last sold, in July 2020, after sixty-plus years of single-family ownership, it transacted at a price of approximately six and a half million dollars. The current configuration — five to six bedrooms, three and a half to six bathrooms, depending on which records are consulted, with a total interior area of roughly six thousand square feet on a lot of about three-quarters of an acre — reflects both the original 1921 plan and the cumulative additions and modifications of subsequent ownership. European oak floors. Vaulted ceilings throughout. Skylights and abundant glazing in the principal rooms. White walls. French doors to walled terraces. Mature landscaping. The architectural fundamentals that Henry Greene drew in 1921 — the Spanish Colonial Revival massing, the indoor-outdoor flow, the relationship between principal living spaces and outdoor terraces, the proportions of the major rooms — remain.

The Kelly House is identified in real estate listings of recent decades as “possibly one of the most historically significant homes in Los Feliz.” The phrase is, by the standards of luxury real estate marketing, restrained, and it is supported by the documentary record: a 1921 Henry Greene design, with subsequent Henry Greene alterations from his solo practice years, on a substantial Los Feliz lot, in continuous residential use for more than a century, retaining its essential architectural character.

The Building’s Place in the Greene & Greene Story

The Kelly House occupies a particular position in the firm’s late-partnership and post-partnership work. It is, on the one hand, a Spanish Colonial Revival residence — a stylistic register the firm did not work in often, but worked in capably when commissioned. It is, on the other hand, a piece of the Earle C. Anthony patronage relationship that runs through the firm’s late period and constitutes one of the most sustained client connections in the entire Greene & Greene record. The house belongs to both stories: the story of Henry Greene’s stylistic versatility in his late partnership years, and the story of Earle C. Anthony’s continued reliance on the firm across more than a decade of commissions.

It is also, simply as a residence, one of the most fully realized Henry Greene houses of the 1921–1922 period. The lot is generous. The plan is ambitious. The materials are first-rate. The vocabulary, while not the firm’s signature Craftsman, is executed with the same proportional discipline and the same attention to indoor-outdoor relationship that defined the better-known Pasadena work. The Aberdeen Avenue house has not been written about in the major Greene & Greene monographs, and it does not appear on the standard tour itineraries, but it is, on its own architectural merits, among the firm’s most accomplished late-partnership residences.

That it remains in private ownership and intact, after more than a century, is the kind of quiet survival that is most characteristic of the firm’s residential portfolio. The buildings the firm designed have, in general, fared well in the long run, more often than not because successive owners have understood what they had and have chosen to keep it.

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Closing Reflection

There are buildings whose fame has carried them, across the decades, into the public consciousness — buildings that schoolchildren sketch in art class and that tour buses stop to photograph. There are also buildings, in any architect’s portfolio, that have escaped that kind of attention without having lost any of their architectural quality. The Kate A. Kelly House at 2550 North Aberdeen Avenue is one of the latter. It does not appear on the Greene & Greene tour. It is not photographed in the firm’s monographs. The general public does not, on any ordinary day, know it exists. It does, in fact, exist. It is one of the most accomplished late-partnership residences Henry Greene ever drew, and it has stood at its address in Los Feliz for more than a century.

The story of the building is also, fundamentally, a story about a relationship between an architect and a patron — and about the way commissions move through families and friendships, generation by generation, when a particular client decides that a particular architect is the architect to use. Earle C. Anthony commissioned Greene & Greene for his Beverly Hills house in 1909. He commissioned them for his Hope Street showroom in 1911. He commissioned them for his mother-in-law’s house in 1921. He commissioned them again in 1922 for the relocation of his own house. Each commission produced a building. The buildings stand or have stood. The relationship between the architect and the patron, sustained across more than a decade and across multiple programs, was the channel through which the architectural quality of each individual building was made possible.

The Kelly House is, in this sense, a piece of evidence about how Greene & Greene actually worked in the firm’s late period. It worked through long client relationships. It worked through families. It produced, for those families, residences of substance and character. Most of those residences are still standing. The one at 2550 North Aberdeen is one of them.

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