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The Lloyd E. and Rachel Morrison House

On a modest stretch of Alhambra Road in South Pasadena, on a lot of approximately sixty-eight hundred square feet, stands a small one-story Craftsman cottage of approximately twelve hundred and eighty-six square feet of interior space, configured as two original bedrooms, one bathroom, a living room with a fireplace, a formal dining room with original built-in corner cabinets, a kitchen, a laundry room with pantry, and a front porch from which the residents have been drinking their morning coffee for one hundred and three years. The house was designed in 1923 by Henry Mather Greene, working under his solo professional designation Henry M. Greene, Architect, in the second year of his independent Pasadena practice following the formal dissolution of Greene & Greene at the end of 1922. The clients were Lloyd E. Morrison and his wife Rachel.

The Lloyd E. and Rachel Morrison House is among the smallest residential commissions in the Greene & Greene catalog, and one of the clearest demonstrations of what Henry Greene’s residential practice produced when working at modest budgets and modest programs. It is identified on the City of South Pasadena Inventory of Historic Resources as a 1923 Craftsman residence and is locally designated as a historic property of individual merit. It does not appear on Greene & Greene tour itineraries. It is not photographed in the firm’s monographs. It has been substantially modified over the decades, with the attic converted at some point to provide two additional bedrooms upstairs and a renovation recorded in 1927 — only four years after construction. What the building offers, after a century of residential occupation, is a quiet survival: the Greene hallmarks visible in the porch beams and the Craftsman proportions of the principal volumes, the original corner cabinets in the dining room, the modest scale of a house designed, as one local writer has put it, not to be looked at as much as to be lived in.

The Commission

Lloyd E. and Rachel Morrison commissioned Henry Greene in 1923 to design a small Craftsman residence on a modest residential lot south of Huntington Drive in South Pasadena. The address is 1414 Alhambra Road. The lot is approximately one-sixth of an acre. The program, judging from the building that resulted, was a comfortable two-bedroom one-bathroom single-family residence with the standard early-twentieth-century domestic complement of living room, dining room, kitchen, laundry, and porch — the program of a small, complete house for a working middle-class family in a residential city already established as a desirable suburb of Los Angeles.

The Morrison commission appears in the firm’s records under the joint name of both spouses, with Lloyd E. and Rachel Morrison both identified as clients. The convention is slightly different from the dual-naming pattern observed in earlier partnership-era commissions like the 1911 Lena W. Huston House and the 1912 Mary Maud Earle Apartment Building, where the firm’s records used one spouse’s name and other documentary sources used the other’s. In the Morrison commission, both names appear in the firm’s own designation of the project, treating the husband and wife as co-clients of equal documentary standing. The convention is consistent with broader changes in early-twentieth-century property registration and household co-ownership that increased recognition of married women’s role in residential commissions during the 1920s.

The HMG attribution that appears in the firm’s record of the project — Henry Mather Greene specifically — identifies the work as Henry’s solo work rather than as a partnership commission. By 1923 the formal Greene & Greene firm was dissolved. Henry was operating the Pasadena office on his own under the professional name Henry M. Greene, Architect. The Morrison House is among the early commissions of that solo practice.

Henry Greene in 1923

The opening years of Henry Mather Greene’s solo practice were, by his own and his contemporaries’ accounts, a period of recovery and re-establishment. Henry had been ill in 1921 and into early 1922 — well enough documented in the firm’s later history that his subsequent reactivation is a recognized event in his biography — and the formal dissolution of the partnership at the end of 1922 placed him, at age fifty-two, in the position of rebuilding a residential architectural practice under his own name in the same Pasadena where he had been working for nearly thirty years. The earliest commissions of his solo practice were correspondingly varied in scale: alterations and additions to existing houses, including the work on the Earle C. Anthony–related Kate A. Kelly House on North Aberdeen Avenue in Los Feliz; new residential commissions; and modest projects like the Morrison House at the smaller end of the program range.

The Morrison commission, in this respect, represents an important kind of work in the early Henry Greene solo practice — the work that confirmed the office could continue to function on commissions across a range of budgets and programs, not exclusively the high-end Pasadena residences that had defined the firm’s Peak Period output. A small Craftsman cottage in South Pasadena, executed for a working middle-class family on a modest lot, was the kind of commission that Henry’s office in 1923 was prepared to take. The architectural quality on display in the porch beams and the original interior detailing reflects the same care that the firm had brought to its larger commissions, applied at a scale appropriate to the program at hand.

It is worth noting that 1923 was a year in which Henry’s brother Charles, on the other side of the geographic and stylistic divide that had opened between them since 1916, was working at a comparable modest scale in his own way — building his brick house and studio in Carmel-by-the-Sea out of salvaged materials, completing a Bay Area house and studio commission for Robert Tolmie at 250 Scenic Avenue in Piedmont, and finishing the long-running D. L. James House on the Carmel Highlands. Both brothers, in 1923, were working at scales different from the partnership’s Peak Period production. The reasons differed — Charles by choice and temperament, Henry by circumstance and the constraints of post-partnership solo practice — but the results converged in a way that is sometimes obscured by the more dramatic scale of the Pasadena Ultimate Bungalows. The Morrison House and Charles’s contemporary Carmel work belong to the same architectural moment.

What Survives

The Morrison House, in its current state, is a building that has been modified, adapted, and lived in across a hundred and three years. The attic was converted, at some point in the building’s twentieth-century history, to provide two additional bedrooms upstairs — a typical adaptation of small early-twentieth-century houses to accommodate growing families that the original two-bedroom configuration could not house. The 1927 renovation, four years after the original construction, is recorded in the property’s history but its scope is not specifically documented in the available sources; renovations of that period commonly involved kitchen modernization, plumbing or electrical updates, or the addition of porches or accessory structures.

What survives, distinctively, of the original 1923 design includes the front porch with its visible Craftsman beam structure — identified by local writers as one of the most clearly Greene-attributable features still visible from the street; the original wood flooring throughout the principal rooms; the formal dining room’s original corner cabinets, which remain integrated into the room’s architecture; the principal-room proportions; and the overall massing of the small one-story residence on its lot.

The house’s listing on the City of South Pasadena Inventory of Historic Resources, with the local designation status that signifies recognition as an individually significant historic property, gives the building a degree of formal preservation protection. The 2025 sale, after fifty years in the same ownership, transferred the property at a price of approximately one million two hundred and fourteen thousand dollars, a figure that reflects both the property’s location in a desirable South Pasadena school district and its identification as an authentic Craftsman residence of documented architectural authorship.

The South Pasadena Context

South Pasadena in 1923 was an established suburban municipality south of Pasadena proper, separated from its larger neighbor by Huntington Drive and developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries along the Pacific Electric Railway lines that had connected the San Gabriel Valley to downtown Los Angeles. The city’s identity, by the 1920s, was that of a smaller, quieter residential community with strong schools, mature street trees, and a building stock that ranged from substantial Craftsman residences and Spanish Colonial Revival houses on its principal residential streets to modest Craftsman cottages on its more workaday blocks.

Alhambra Road, where the Morrison House stands, was one of the workaday blocks. South of Huntington Drive, in a neighborhood developed for middle-income residents who wanted single-family houses on full lots in a respectable suburban setting, the street accommodated a range of small to medium residential buildings of the 1910s and 1920s. The Morrison House, completed in 1923, was one of the better-designed houses on its block — the professional architectural authorship of Henry Mather Greene placing it, in design quality, somewhat above the speculative or pattern-book residences that constituted much of the surrounding building stock — but it was sized and programmed to fit the neighborhood. It did not impose. It joined.

The neighborhood’s continuing identity, into the twenty-first century, has retained much of that early-twentieth-century suburban character. The trees have matured. Some original houses have been demolished or substantially altered. The Morrison House remains. It is, on its modest stretch of Alhambra Road, one of the few remaining houses by Henry Greene in the area, and one of the last clear physical reminders of what his early solo practice was producing in the years immediately after the Greene & Greene partnership ended.

The Building’s Place in the Greene & Greene Story

The Morrison House occupies a particular position in the Greene & Greene catalog. It is one of the firm’s smallest residential commissions, executed at a scale and budget that the firm did not generally take on during the Peak Period. It is among the early commissions of Henry Greene’s solo practice, executed in the second year after the formal dissolution of the partnership. It is locally designated on the City of South Pasadena Inventory of Historic Resources as an individual historic property.

The building’s significance, however, is not limited to its place in the Pasadena historic record. It is also a piece of evidence about what Henry Greene’s residential vocabulary could do when applied at the smallest scale. The front porch beams and the original interior detailing demonstrate that the firm’s design sensibility — the careful proportions, the clean Craftsman lines, the integration of structural elements with decorative detail — could be carried into a one-story two-bedroom cottage as effectively as into a two-story Pasadena Ultimate Bungalow. The architectural language of the firm was scale-flexible. The Morrison House is the proof.

It is also a piece of evidence about the kind of work Henry’s solo practice was prepared to take in 1923. He could have declined small commissions and held out for the larger residential programs that had defined the partnership’s Peak Period output. He did not. He took the Morrison commission, designed it carefully, executed it well, and produced a building that has stood on its lot for more than a century. The decision says something about Henry’s understanding of his post-partnership practice and about his willingness to apply his architectural attention to the residential work that came his way at any scale.

Quick Reference

Closing Reflection

There is a particular kind of architectural commission that does not draw the visitor’s eye. The Morrison House is one of those commissions. A small Craftsman cottage on a modest South Pasadena street, designed for a working middle-class couple, on a lot of about a sixth of an acre, at a budget that produced a house of about thirteen hundred square feet. The visitor walking past the building today, without knowing what they were looking at, would see a pleasant older South Pasadena residence with mature landscaping and an attractive front porch. That is, in important respects, exactly what the building is.

What it also is — and what gives it its quiet place in the Greene & Greene record — is the documentary evidence of an architect’s continued careful attention to a small residential program in the second year of a solo practice rebuilt out of the dissolution of one of the most distinguished partnerships in American architecture. Henry Greene drew it in 1923. The Morrisons commissioned it. The contractor built it. Subsequent owners, across a century, have lived in it, modified it, renovated it, expanded its bedroom count by converting the attic, and ultimately, after fifty years in one family’s hands, sold it forward in 2025 to a new owner.

The continuity is not architectural in the dramatic sense. It is residential in the ordinary sense. The building has done what it was designed to do. Henry Greene drew the porch beams. The porch beams are still there. The dining room corner cabinets are still where the dining room corner cabinets have always been. The house is on the City of South Pasadena historic resources list because the city has decided that buildings like this — modest Craftsman cottages by recognized architects, surviving on their original lots — are worth preserving. The decision is, on the available evidence, the correct one.

The Morrison House does not need to be a museum to count. It needs to keep being a house. It is.

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