Essays in theArts & Craftstradition

Revival

Jul 19, 2026

Dipped, Not Painted: The Exterior Colors of Greene & Greene, Then and Now

The Greene & Greene houses were never brown. They were green — dipped, not painted — and the palette is recoverable with modern stains.…

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Field Notes

Jul 19, 2026

The Steps Under the Beam

A Field Note on the stacked corbels of the Gamble House entrance hall — the stair's argument in miniature, and how a modern shop…

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Architecture

Jul 19, 2026

The Same Pencil: The Sespe Ranch Bunkhouse

In October 1910, the office that had just finished the Gamble House drew a $7,000 dormitory for citrus pickers — in twenty-four sheets. What…

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Field Notes

Jul 19, 2026

The Garage Doors at the Gamble House

On the wooden doors of the Gamble House garage — the electric car they closed on in 1909, the bookstore they open for now,…

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Landscape

Jul 1, 2026

The Roofless Room: The Terraces and Pergolas of Greene & Greene

The terrace, the pergola, the pond — Greene & Greene did not treat the ground around a house as leftover space. They built rooms…

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Field Notes

Jun 30, 2026

The Table That Might Be Henry’s

Most Greene & Greene furniture is credited to Charles. A library table in the Thorsen House living room may be one of the rare…

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Field Notes

Jun 29, 2026

The Rose That Needed a Trellis

In the last of the ultimate bungalows, Charles Greene did the thing he spent a career not doing — he painted a picture on…

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Field Notes

Jun 28, 2026

Two Houses Wearing One Name: The Gamble House in Back to the Future

The Gamble House is famous as Doc Brown's mansion in Back to the Future. But only the exterior is the Gamble — the interiors…

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Field Notes

Jun 26, 2026

The Serving Table at the Pratt House

The dining table at Greene & Greene's Pratt House gets remembered. The serving table against the wall — the suite's humblest piece — is…

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Architecture

Jun 26, 2026

The Fire at the Center: The Inglenook in the Greene & Greene House

The inglenook was the oldest idea in the house. This is how the Greenes made the corner of the fire the fixed point a…

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Field Notes

Jun 24, 2026

The Lantern at the Prow

The four-foot lantern at the prow of the Blacker House porte-cochère was the first thing any guest met. It was also the most portable…

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Field Notes

Jun 23, 2026

The Door They Spent On

The Halsted House is a modest 1905 Park Place bungalow built for the manager of the Pasadena Ice Company. Its front door shows where…

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Architecture

Jun 21, 2026

The Imported Forest: How Greene & Greene Built a California Style from Tropical Wood

The most celebrated regional architecture in America was built, on its visible surfaces, from a forest shipped in from Burma, Honduras, and the timber…

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Field Notes

Jun 21, 2026

The Edge They Rounded

A field note on the one detail no photograph carries: the hand-eased edge that runs through every Greene & Greene house, made for the…

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People

Jun 20, 2026

The Houses Bear Their Names: The Women Who Commissioned Greene & Greene

Before the famous couples came the women — Reeve, Tichenor, Garfield, Robinson, the Culbertson sisters, Ranney — whose commissions shaped the firm.

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Field Notes

Jun 17, 2026

The Water They Kept Small

A field note on the small lily pool set into the clinker brick of the Gamble House rear terrace — the brothers grand water…

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Field Notes

Jun 15, 2026

The Air Cure at the Gamble House

The Gamble House sleeping porches are usually explained as Japanese indoor-outdoor living. They were really an air cure: a turn-of-the-century medical prescription, given beautiful…

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Field Notes

Jun 14, 2026

The Roses on the Linen

The rose-vine frieze in the Thorsen House living room looks carved, or papered. It is neither: it is hand-painted on Belgian linen, woven into…

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Architecture

Jun 14, 2026

The Pillar That Touched Nothing: Greene & Greene at Oaklawn

Greene & Greene built one bridge. The railroad that ran beneath it demanded a pillar the brothers said it did not need. Ninety years…

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Field Notes

Jun 14, 2026

The Door the Fraternity Kept

The Thorsen House survived not as a museum but as a fraternity, and its art-glass front door — by Emil Lange — is the…

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Field Notes

Jun 12, 2026

The Bats in the Living Room

A field note on the carved redwood frieze that circles the Gamble House living room - a panorama of California that runs from the…

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Architecture

Jun 12, 2026

Remade in Three Years: The Van Rossem–Neill House

Greene & Greene built 400 Arroyo Terrace as a plain clapboard speculative house in 1903, then stripped it to the frame and remade it…

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Field Notes

Jun 11, 2026

The Wall That Made the Street

A field note on the low boulder-and-clinker walls that run the length of Arroyo Terrace — the most public and least noticed thing Greene…

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Field Notes

Jun 10, 2026

The Downspout at the Gamble House

A field note on the most overlooked piece of designed metalwork on the Gamble House — the plain copper downspouts that carry the same…

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The Houses

Jun 9, 2026

Beyond the Arroyo: The Greene & Greene Houses Built Outside Pasadena

The brothers are remembered as Pasadena architects, but much of the major work is elsewhere — a beach at Long Beach, a corner in…

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Field Notes

Jun 9, 2026

The Leather That Holds the Light

On either side of the Gamble House inglenook, a lantern hangs not from a chain but from a band of leather looped over a…

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Field Notes

Jun 8, 2026

The Suite That Outlived Its Room

At the Huntington you can stand in the Robinson House dining room. The furniture is the real 1906 suite; the room around it is…

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Legacy

Jun 7, 2026

The House That Was Almost White: The Survival of the Gamble House

The Gamble House is the only great Greene & Greene commission to survive intact. Its completeness was not inevitable — it came down to…

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Field Notes

Jun 7, 2026

The Wrong Fair

Greene & Greene's Japanese manner is almost always traced to the 1893 Chicago fair. The buildings say otherwise: the real sources were Edward Morse's…

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People

Jun 6, 2026

The Source Had a Storefront: The Bentz Family and Greene & Greene’s Japan

The Greenes' Japan is usually told as a story of looking. But the Asian objects that shaped it arrived through dealers — and two…

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Field Notes

Jun 6, 2026

The Gate They Did Not Translate

Greene & Greene absorbed Japan by translating it. At the Tichenor House they did the one thing they almost never did — they quoted…

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Architecture

Jun 5, 2026

A Building Without the Brother: Henry Greene’s Longfellow Elementary School

In 1911, while Charles was occupied with Green Gables, Henry Greene designed a fireproof concrete school in Pasadena — the clearest portrait we have…

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Field Notes

Jun 5, 2026

The Second Draft: The James Swan House

Greene & Greene's first commission for an outside client, the 1898 James Swan House, was sawed in half in the 1920s and redesigned by…

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Architecture

Jun 4, 2026

The Outsider in the Catalog: Job 222 and the Stimson House

The Avery archive credits Greene & Greene with twenty-nine sheets for the Mission Revival house at 227 Oaklawn — including the foundation plan and…

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Field Notes

Jun 4, 2026

The Cloud Lift

Two horizontal lines and two short radii. It is the smallest unit of the brothers' architectural grammar, and it carries the rest of the…

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Field Notes

Jun 3, 2026

The Window That Wasn’t Theirs: The Bolton House Oriel

The five-panel oriel above the stair on the Dr. W. T. Bolton House — the feature the house is most known by — was…

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Architecture

Jun 3, 2026

The Drawn Roof: How Greene & Greene Developed the Overhanging Eave, 1903–1909

How the brothers worked out their signature overhanging eave on six commissions between 1903 and 1909 — from the modest tile roof at Bandini…

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The Houses

May 30, 2026

The Bowsprit in Berkeley: The William R. Thorsen House

The last of the Ultimate Bungalows, on a corner lot two blocks from the University of California, built for a sea captain's son. How…

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Field Notes

May 29, 2026

The Pond at the Blacker House

A field note on the original lily pond at the Blacker House — gone for most of the twentieth century, rebuilt in 1994 from…

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The Houses

May 28, 2026

The Quiet Ultimate: The Charles M. Pratt House at Ojai

Among the five Ultimate Bungalows, the Charles M. Pratt House at Ojai is the one made of stone, not teak — the rustic argument…

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Field Notes

May 28, 2026

The Andirons at the Gamble Hearth

A field note on the cast bronze andirons in the Gamble House living-room fireplace — the smallest piece of furniture in the room, and…

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People

May 27, 2026

The President’s Widow in Pasadena: The Lucretia R. Garfield House

In May 1903, a letter arrived at the Pasadena offices of Greene & Greene on stationery bordered in black. The widow of an assassinated…

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Field Notes

May 27, 2026

The Viking at the Gate

A close reading of the wrought-iron longship panel set into the entrance gate of the William R. Thorsen House in Berkeley — the only…

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The Houses

May 26, 2026

The Polychrome Conclusion: The Cordelia A. Culbertson House

The Cordelia A. Culbertson House (1911-1913) was the brothers' largest, costliest, and last great commission together — a gunite-and-tile villa around an Italian courtyard,…

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Field Notes

May 26, 2026

The Inglenook at the Reeve House

Of the 139 decorative pieces Greene & Greene designed for the 1904 Jennie A. Reeve House in Long Beach, only four are still in…

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The Houses

May 25, 2026

The Bungalow and the Boulevard: The Earle C. Anthony House

The Earle C. Anthony House of 1909 is one of the few Greene & Greene houses built outside Pasadena — and the only one…

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Field Notes

May 25, 2026

The Kitchen at the Gamble House

A field note on the kitchen of the Gamble House — built of pale maple and sugar pine, not the teak and mahogany of…

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The Houses

May 25, 2026

Worth More in Pieces: The Two Undoings of the Blacker House

The Robert R. Blacker House was the largest and most lavish of the brothers' ultimate bungalows — a total work of art. Twice, in…

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Field Notes

May 25, 2026

The House She Was Allowed to Draw

A field note on 440 Arroyo Terrace — the one house in the famous Greene & Greene row designed by a woman, the draftswoman…

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Landscape

May 23, 2026

Twenty Years on the Hill: Charles Greene’s Green Gables in Woodside

Green Gables in Woodside was the largest commission Greene & Greene ever took, and the one Charles Greene could not stop returning to —…

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Field Notes

May 23, 2026

The Name Came Late: The Origin of the Ultimate Bungalow

A field note on the phrase “ultimate bungalow” — a name the Greenes never used, fixed in print by Randell Makinson in 1977, and…

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The Houses

May 22, 2026

The Bungalow Turned Inward

The Thorsen House in Berkeley is the only one of Greene and Greene's five ultimate bungalows built for a city lot. Denied a landscape,…

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Field Notes

May 22, 2026

The Lantern in Gallery 129

A field note on a single hanging lantern from the Robert R. Blacker House — and the journey that carried it from a Pasadena…

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Legacy

May 21, 2026

How the Brothers Were Written: A Reading List for Greene & Greene

Every essential book on Greene & Greene, in the order it was written — from Esther McCoy's 1960 rescue to the woodworking literature of…

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The Houses

May 21, 2026

The Courtyard They Were Given

In 1903 a Californio client asked Greene & Greene for the house of his ancestors. The Arturo Bandini House is gone — but the…

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Field Notes

May 21, 2026

The End of the Rafter

A field note on the Greene & Greene rafter tail — the most photographed and least understood timber in the brothers' houses, and why…

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The Houses

May 21, 2026

The Last House Together

The Cordelia A. Culbertson House of 1911–1913 was the last great house Charles and Henry Greene designed together. It is built of gunite and…

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Field Notes

May 21, 2026

The Square Ebony Peg

A field note on the small black squares that mark every Greene & Greene interior — and why these signature 'pegs' are not the…

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Field Notes

May 21, 2026

The Brick That Failed

A field note on the clinker brick at the foundation of the Gamble House — the over-fired, misshapen brick the kiln was meant to…

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Archive

May 17, 2026

The Divided Archive: How the Greene & Greene Papers Were Scattered, and Found Again

An essay on the strange path the Greene & Greene papers took from a Pasadena office in 1922 to three repositories on two coasts…

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Field Notes

May 17, 2026

The Sleeping Porch at the Pratt House

A field note on the three sleeping porches at the Charles M. Pratt House in Ojai — and the way Casa Barranca, alone among…

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The Houses

May 16, 2026

The Forest in the House

On the William R. Thorsen House in Berkeley — the only ultimate bungalow built outside Pasadena, on an urban corner lot, for a lumber…

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Field Notes

May 16, 2026

The Octagon at Oakholm

A field note on Charles Greene's own house at 268 Arroyo Terrace in Pasadena — Oakholm — and the partial-octagonal living room where the…

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Field Notes

May 15, 2026

The Tree at the Door

A field note on the front door of the Gamble House — and the species in the leaded art glass that has been misidentified…

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The Houses

May 15, 2026

The Cliffside Argument

The D.L. James House at Seaward — Charles Greene's 1918–1922 cliffside house in Carmel — appears to refute everything the bungalow stands for. It…

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Legacy

May 13, 2026

The Long Apprenticeship

When Randell Makinson came to the architecture school at the University of Southern California in the early 1950s, the work of Charles and Henry…

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Field Notes

May 8, 2026

The Bench at the Foot of the Stair

Stand at the foot of the Gamble House staircase and the house tells you, before you climb, what kind of house it is. The…

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Craft

May 7, 2026

The Climbed Argument

In every Greene & Greene house of consequence, there is a moment when the visitor stops being a visitor and becomes, for a few…

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The Movement

May 6, 2026

The Magazine That Made the Brothers Visible

In October of 1901, a furniture manufacturer in Eastwood, New York, began a magazine. He had been making chairs and settles for three years,…

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Field Notes

May 4, 2026

The Attic at the Gamble House

The first surprise of the Gamble House attic is that it is not, by any common definition of the word, an attic. You reach…

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Landscape

May 3, 2026

The Arroyo and the House

The Arroyo Seco is not, strictly speaking, a river. It is a seasonal watercourse — a dry stream for most of the year, a…

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Field Notes

May 3, 2026

The Courtyard at Duncan-Irwin

You enter the courtyard at the Duncan-Irwin House by accident. There is no formal door, no announced threshold; the house simply unfolds around all…

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People

May 1, 2026

The Brother Who Made It Buildable

The watercolors survive in the archive at the Huntington, and they have done a great deal of work in the century since they were…

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Field Notes

May 1, 2026

The Lantern at the Stair

Walk into the entrance hall of the Laurabelle A. Robinson House on Hillcrest Avenue in Pasadena and look up. Suspended on four iron chains…

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The Houses

Apr 30, 2026

The House at Ocean Boulevard

In the autumn of 1904, before the names Gamble and Blacker and Thorsen meant anything in the architectural record, Adelaide M. Tichenor of Long…

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Field Notes

Apr 30, 2026

The Hanging Light

In late April, walking the perimeter of the Duncan-Irwin House on Grand Avenue in Pasadena, one comes upon the wisteria. It hangs from the…

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Field Notes

Apr 29, 2026

The Pagoda at the Porte-Cochère

At the porte-cochère of the Robert R. Blacker House in Pasadena, suspended from the heavy timber overhang where the carriage drive meets the entry,…

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Architecture

Apr 29, 2026

The Stack That Anchors the Roof

Look at any photograph of a Greene & Greene house taken in elevation, and your eye, whether you intend it to or not, will…

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The Houses

Apr 28, 2026

The Banker, the Heiress, and the Brothers

The house at the edge of the Arroyo Seco that Charles and Henry Greene designed for Henry M. Robinson and Laurabelle Arms Robinson between…

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The Movement

Apr 27, 2026

The Price of the Honest Chair

William Morris, addressing an audience of working men in a Hampstead lecture hall in the 1880s, said something that has haunted the Arts &…

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Landscape

Apr 26, 2026

The Garden That Was Already There

The first principle of Japanese landscape design is borrowed scenery — *shakkei*, the practice of incorporating distant mountains, neighboring trees, and unowned views into…

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Craft

Apr 25, 2026

The Curve That Holds the House

Look long enough at any Greene & Greene interior and you will find it: a horizontal member whose lower edge does not run straight…

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People

Apr 23, 2026

The Man Who Made the Light

Stand inside the entrance hall of the Gamble House just after sunrise, when the eastern light first strikes the front door, and you understand…

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Craft

Apr 23, 2026

The Joint is the Ornament

Charles Greene first saw Japanese architecture at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago — the Ho-o-den pavilion — on his way west to Pasadena.…

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Architecture

Apr 22, 2026

The Silent Grammar of the Ultimate Bungalow

Walk up the driveway at 4 Westmoreland Place just before sunset and you understand something about Greene & Greene that no photograph can carry.…

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The Houses

Apr 21, 2026

The House Where It Began to Change

Every significant body of work has its hinge point — the commission where accumulated instinct tips into something unmistakably new, where the architect stops…

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The Movement

Apr 21, 2026

The Long Walk West

William Morris never saw California. He died in 1896, four years before Charles Greene made his first significant departure from the shingle-style cottages that…

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People

Apr 20, 2026

The Man Who Held the Plane

His name appears in the commission records, in the contracts, in the careful ledgers of the most ambitious residential building program in Pasadena’s history.…

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Legacy

Apr 20, 2026

The Legible Hand

There is a moment that happens to almost everyone who visits the Gamble House for the first time. It occurs not in the entry…

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