On a long wooded ridge in upper Piedmont, the dividing line between what was then the city of Piedmont and what would soon become the neighborhood of Montclair, runs Scenic Avenue. The ridge was developed in the early years of the twentieth century by the Realty Syndicate, the East Bay land development consortium, on a deliberately marketed proposition: that the ridge — too steep, too remote, and too undeveloped for ordinary suburban demand — would suit “literary chaps” and artists who, in the syndicate’s view, “were supposed to buy what no one else wanted.” The strategy worked. Across the early 1900s, Scenic Avenue became the residential ridge of an artistic and literary community that included Jack London, the poet George Sterling, the writer Herman Whitaker, and the painter Xavier Martinez — a Bay Area circle who became locally known as “The Crowd,” whose parties were memorable, and whose cultural influence spread well beyond the ridge for which the syndicate had originally struggled to find buyers.
By 1923, when the Robert Tolmie House and Studio was commissioned and completed at 250 Scenic Avenue, the most famous members of The Crowd were no longer present. London had died in 1916. Sterling had relocated to Carmel-by-the-Sea in 1905, where he would die by his own hand in 1926. Whitaker, Martinez, and other early colony members had moved on, died, or scattered. But the architectural reputation of Scenic Avenue — as the street where artists and writers built — endured. The Tolmie commission was, in this respect, a kind of late entry into a defined architectural tradition: a house-and-studio program for an owner who wanted to live and work in the kind of building, on the kind of street, that Scenic Avenue had become known for.
The architect Robert Tolmie chose was Charles Sumner Greene. The choice was significant on its own terms, and it was specifically significant in 1923. The formal Greene & Greene partnership had dissolved at the end of 1922. Charles was operating from his Carmel-by-the-Sea studio, in the bohemian artistic settlement of poets, painters, and craftsmen that he had been part of since 1916. The same year the Tolmie commission was completed in Piedmont, Charles was completing his own brick studio in Carmel — a residence and workshop that he was building, for himself and his family, out of used brick salvaged from a demolished hotel in Pacific Grove. The Tolmie commission and Charles’s own house and studio were running, in parallel, through 1923.
The Commission
Robert Tolmie commissioned Charles Greene to design a house and a studio at 250 Scenic Avenue in Piedmont. The combined program — the residence and the dedicated artist’s workspace — is documented in the firm’s records as the Robert Tolmie House and Studio, with the dual designation explicit in the commission’s title. The CSG attribution in the firm’s records identifies this as Charles’s work specifically, executed from his Carmel studio in the first full year after the partnership’s dissolution.
The completed house, as recorded in twenty-first-century property records, occupies a lot of approximately nine thousand three hundred and sixty-five square feet — a little more than one fifth of an acre — on the upslope side of Scenic Avenue. The principal residence contains approximately two thousand six hundred and eighty-five square feet of floor area, configured today as three bedrooms and two and a half bathrooms. The studio component — the second program element of the original commission — was integrated into the broader composition of the house and grounds in a manner consistent with Charles’s late-period practice: a workspace that was part of the residence’s architectural envelope, accessible to but not separated from the residential life of the family.
A house-and-studio commission is, in the Greene & Greene catalog, a relatively uncommon program. Most of the firm’s residential commissions were straightforward houses, with studios and workshops appearing only when the client’s profession or vocation specifically required them. The fact that the Tolmie commission incorporated a studio as a primary program element — and that the studio appeared on the same drawing set as the house — indicates that the workspace was central to what Tolmie was building, not a secondary or accessory element. The fact that the address was 250 Scenic Avenue, on the ridge whose entire reputation was built on the connection between residence and artistic practice, is consistent with the program.
Charles Greene in 1923
The 1923 Tolmie commission sits at a specific moment in Charles Sumner Greene’s career — the moment of his transition from the commercial practice of Greene & Greene to what would become his independent Carmel studio years.
Charles had relocated to Carmel-by-the-Sea in 1916, drawn by the bohemian artistic settlement that George Sterling had begun developing there a decade earlier. The 1918 commission for the D. L. James House on the Carmel Highlands had given him the practical reason to make Carmel his permanent home; that commission, with its construction running through 1923, occupied much of his architectural attention through the early 1920s. With Henry running the Pasadena office on his own and showing no expectation of Charles’s return, the formal Greene & Greene partnership dissolved in 1922. Henry took the Pasadena practice forward under his own name; Charles continued from Carmel under the partnership name on remaining commissions and increasingly under his own name on new work.
The year 1923 was, in this transition, particularly active for Charles. He was completing the D. L. James House. He was building his own brick house and studio at Lincoln Street and 13th in Carmel, using used brick from the demolished Pacific Grove hotel. He was working on the Tolmie commission in Piedmont. And he was, more broadly, transitioning from the commercial architectural practice that had defined his career through the Peak Period into what he himself thought of as a more bohemian artistic life — a life that placed his architectural work in closer relationship to his own artistic practice and to the cultural community of Carmel.
The Tolmie commission, executed for an artist’s house-and-studio program on the most established artists’ ridge in the Bay Area, fits this transition with precision. The kind of project Charles was doing for himself in Carmel — a brick residence integrated with a working studio, on a street with a strong artistic-residential identity — was the kind of project he was simultaneously doing for Tolmie in Piedmont. The two projects were close in spirit, close in program, and close in date.
The Architecture of Charles’s Late Period
Charles Sumner Greene’s late-period architectural vocabulary, as it developed during the Carmel years, departed in significant respects from the Pasadena Peak Period work for which the firm was best known. The Ultimate Bungalows had been collaborative partnership commissions, with Henry’s planning discipline integrated with Charles’s detailing instincts, both brothers contributing to the elaborately resolved timber-and-shingle compositions that defined that period of the firm’s output.
Charles’s solo Carmel-period work was something different. The vocabulary was simpler, the materials often more economical — used brick, salvaged timber, and locally quarried stone instead of imported teak and mahogany. The Charles Greene Carmel House on Lincoln Street, completed the same year as the Tolmie commission, exemplifies this approach: a brick residence and studio of considerable architectural distinction, executed within significant budget constraints, using recycled and salvaged materials wherever possible. The post–World War I period had imposed real economic constraints on residential architecture, and Charles, by 1923, was specifically demonstrating how distinguished design could be achieved within those constraints.
The Tolmie commission, executed in this same late-period vocabulary, would have shared the design sensibility that Charles was applying to his own house in Carmel. The result, on the upslope side of Scenic Avenue, was a residence-and-studio composition consistent with the artistic-architectural moment of 1923 — economical in its means, sophisticated in its design, and integrated with the artistic community of the street it stood on.
The Building Today
The Robert Tolmie House and Studio remains standing at 250 Scenic Avenue, in continuous residential use a hundred and three years after its completion. The current configuration of the residence — three bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, approximately two thousand six hundred and eighty-five square feet of interior space, on the original lot of approximately nine thousand three hundred and sixty-five square feet — reflects the original 1923 program with the modifications and adaptations of intervening ownership. The studio component, present in the original commission documents, may or may not survive in its original 1923 configuration; the kind of dedicated artist’s workspace that Charles designed in 1923 has, in many comparable buildings of the era, been adapted into general residential use as successive owners have occupied the property.
The Scenic Avenue ridge today is no longer the literary-Bohemian colony that had defined it in the early decades of the twentieth century. The Crowd is long gone. The Realty Syndicate that originally developed the street is long dissolved. What remains, on the ridge, is a substantial residential neighborhood of older houses, many of them dating to the 1910s and 1920s, occupying generous lots on terrain that was once considered too steep and too remote for ordinary suburban development. The Tolmie House is one of those older houses. Its architectural identity as a Charles Greene commission of 1923 is preserved in the firm’s records and in the Greene & Greene scholarly literature, even where it is not publicly marked on the street itself.
The Building’s Place in the Greene & Greene Story
The Robert Tolmie House and Studio occupies a particular position in the Greene & Greene catalog. It is among the first residences Charles Sumner Greene executed under the Greene & Greene firm name in the year following the partnership’s formal dissolution — a closing partnership-era commission that was, in practical terms, a Charles solo work executed from the Carmel studio. It is one of the firm’s relatively rare house-and-studio commissions, with the studio as a defined program element rather than an accessory space. And it is one of the firm’s commissions on an architecturally significant Bay Area street, sited on a ridge whose reputation as a setting for artists’ residences predated the commission by two decades.
It is also, in its way, a piece of evidence about Charles’s late-period architectural identity. The residences he was designing in 1923 — for himself in Carmel, for Tolmie in Piedmont — were integrated with artistic life rather than separate from it. They were buildings in which the practice of art could happen as a part of the practice of daily living. The Greene & Greene firm had always understood the integration of architecture and life — the Ultimate Bungalows had been demonstrations of that integration on a generous Pasadena scale. Charles’s late practice continued the same demonstration, on smaller budgets, in different geographies, for clients whose programs included the practice of art as a defined part of the residential life the building was meant to support.
The Tolmie House, on Scenic Avenue, is one of those late demonstrations.
Quick Reference
- Location: 250 Scenic Avenue, Piedmont, California 94611
- Date: Designed and built 1923
- Architect: Charles Sumner Greene, working from his Carmel-by-the-Sea studio (CSG attribution per the firm’s records, executed under the Greene & Greene firm name in the year following the partnership’s formal dissolution)
- Program: Combined residence and artist’s studio
- Lot: approximately 9,365 square feet (~0.21 acre)
- Residence: approximately 2,685 square feet of interior space; current configuration of three bedrooms and two and a half bathrooms
- Neighborhood context: Scenic Avenue ridge — the residential street developed in the early 1900s by the Realty Syndicate as an artists’ and writers’ colony, home in earlier decades to Jack London, George Sterling, Xavier Martinez, Herman Whitaker, and the broader Bay Area circle known as “The Crowd”
- Charles Greene in 1923: the same year of the Tolmie commission, Charles was simultaneously completing his own brick house and studio at Lincoln Street and 13th in Carmel-by-the-Sea, using used brick from a demolished Pacific Grove hotel — a parallel house-and-studio composition for the architect himself
- Period framing: First year after the formal dissolution of the Greene & Greene partnership; one of Charles Sumner Greene’s transitional commissions between the Pasadena Peak Period collaborative practice and his independent Carmel-period work
- Current status: Existing, in continuous private residential use
Closing Reflection
Among the houses Charles Sumner Greene designed in his late period, the Tolmie House is not the most famous. The D. L. James House on the Carmel Highlands, completed the same year, occupies a more visible position in the published Greene & Greene literature; Charles’s own house on Lincoln Street has become a small pilgrimage destination for visitors to Carmel-by-the-Sea. The Tolmie House sits, more quietly, on the upslope side of a Piedmont street whose Bohemian-colony years had ended a decade before the building was constructed.
But the Tolmie commission carries something specific. It is the moment in 1923 when Charles Sumner Greene, working from his Carmel studio in the first full year of his post-partnership independent practice, accepted a commission for a house-and-studio composition on the most artist-identified residential street in the East Bay, and produced for the client a building consistent with what he was simultaneously building for himself in Carmel. The synchronicity is rare in any architect’s career. To be designing one’s own house and studio, in one’s own bohemian community, in the same year as designing another house and studio for another client in another bohemian community, is to be doing closely related work on closely related programs at closely related moments. It is the kind of professional symmetry that is sometimes only visible after the fact.
The result, at 250 Scenic Avenue, is a 1923 Charles Greene house and studio that has stood on its lot for more than a century — through the slow disappearance of the original Crowd from the Scenic Avenue ridge, through the dissolution of the Realty Syndicate that had developed the street, through the postwar suburban transformations of Piedmont and the East Bay, and into a present in which it survives as one of a relatively small number of late-period Charles Greene works in continuous residential use. It is not the most famous building Charles drew. It is among the most personally connected to the architectural and artistic life he was building for himself in 1923.