On seven flat acres of oceanfront land in the Carmel Highlands, an unincorporated coastal community south of Carmel-by-the-Sea, with the Pacific Ocean lapping at the property on three sides and the surrounding cypress groves rising from the rocky bluffs, stands the residence known as Spindrift at 171 Spindrift Road. The building was originally constructed in 1922 by the Carmel architect and builder Charles H. Gottschalk for the writer Martin A. Flavin, an American novelist and playwright who would later win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1944 for his novel Journey in the Dark. The original Gottschalk-designed structure was an English manor house, executed in the eclectic period revival vocabulary that characterized 1920s Carmel residential architecture, on a coastal bluff site that gave the building one of the most dramatic ocean settings in California residential design.
In 1929, seven years after the original construction, Martin Flavin engaged Charles Sumner Greene to begin what would become a twelve-year continuous engagement with the property. The Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University catalogs the commission as “Martin A. Flavin House, (Carmel Highlands, California, 1929-1941)” — the dates spanning Charles Greene’s sustained involvement in the building’s development from his Carmel Highlands neighbor’s office across the dozen years that would prove to be the longest single-client engagement of his late career. Charles contributed garden walls, the front gate of the property, and — most substantially — a library addition that he designed in its entirety as new construction integrated with the existing Gottschalk envelope. The library addition would, on the documentary evidence available, prove to be one of the most accomplished single architectural designs of Charles’s later years.
The full extent of Charles’s contribution to Spindrift, across the twelve years of his engagement, is documented in the most explicit terms by Martin Flavin himself, who, in correspondence with the Greene & Greene scholar Randell Makinson, identified Charles Greene as the figure who had — over the long period of years — contributed substantially everything of value and distinction to the building, both inside and outside, and who Flavin regarded as the property’s true creator despite Gottschalk’s role as the original architect. This documentary statement, written by the client to one of the most authoritative architectural historians of the firm’s work, represents an unusually direct and unqualified attribution of architectural authorship in a building whose first architect was someone else.
The Carmel Highlands Setting
The Carmel Highlands occupies a particular place in California’s coastal residential geography. The unincorporated community sits on the rocky shoreline south of Carmel-by-the-Sea, with the cypress and pine groves of the coastal hillsides rising from the Pacific in dramatic terraced relationships to the water. The hillsides, the rocky bluffs, the cypress groves, and the long views across the Pacific to the southern coastal horizon define the Highlands as one of the most visually distinctive residential sections of the central California coast.
Spindrift’s seven-acre site is, within this broader Carmel Highlands context, an unusually flat property. The land allows the residence and its associated outbuildings to be laid out across an extended horizontal composition rather than terraced into the hillsides as most Highlands residences are configured. The property is bounded on three sides by the Pacific Ocean, with private bluffs descending to tidepools and a secluded cove accessible only from the property itself. The cypress groves that define the property’s perimeter — both the planted cypress lining the driveway and the natural cypress groves marking the boundary — give the site the particular Carmel coastal character that has defined the region’s residential identity since the early twentieth century.
The granite gated entrance to the property, which Charles Greene contributed to the residence’s architectural character during his 1929-1941 engagement, opens onto the cypress-tree-lined driveway that leads to the principal residence. The entry sequence — granite gate, cypress drive, approach to the manor house — is one of the most architecturally composed arrival experiences in California residential design, and it was Charles’s particular contribution to the property’s overall architectural choreography.
The Original Gottschalk Design
The 1922 original building was designed and constructed by Charles H. Gottschalk, a Carmel architect and builder whose practice had developed alongside the post-1900 residential growth of the Carmel coast. Gottschalk was responsible for the English manor house vocabulary that defined Spindrift’s original architectural identity — a vocabulary distinct from the Mediterranean Revival, Spanish Colonial Revival, and Period Revival styles that dominated 1920s Pasadena residential architecture, and distinct as well from the Arts and Crafts and Craftsman traditions that had defined Charles and Henry Greene’s earlier Pasadena work.
The English manor house style was, in 1920s Carmel, one of several period revival vocabularies that established the architectural character of the community. The Carmel Highlands in particular had developed a residential architectural identity that mixed English, Mediterranean, and California vernacular styles, often integrated through the natural cypress, granite, and sandstone materials that the local landscape provided. Gottschalk’s Spindrift was, within this architectural context, an English manor house executed in stone, plaster, and timber, scaled to the substantial seven-acre site and configured to take advantage of the dramatic ocean views in three directions.
The 1922 building gave Martin Flavin the architectural envelope from which his life on the central California coast would proceed. The English manor vocabulary was a deliberate choice, reflecting Flavin’s particular literary and cultural orientation — a writer working in American naturalistic fiction and dramatic theater chose, for his coastal residence, the architectural language of the English country house tradition that informed the literary and cultural traditions in which he was working. The choice was not unusual in 1920s Carmel; it was the kind of cultivated period revival selection that the community’s writers and artists frequently made.
Martin A. Flavin, Pulitzer Prize-winning Writer
Martin Archer Flavin, born in 1883, was one of the leading American novelists and playwrights of the early-to-mid twentieth century. His professional output spanned the dramatic theater of the 1920s, the popular novels of the 1930s and 1940s, and the Hollywood screenwriting community of the same period. His most successful play, The Criminal Code, premiered in 1929 — the same year he engaged Charles Greene to begin work on Spindrift — and ran for 173 performances on Broadway before being adapted into a 1931 Howard Hawks film starring Walter Huston. His 1923 play Children of the Moon had earlier established his reputation as a dramatic writer of serious psychological intent.
Flavin’s literary career reached its highest formal recognition in 1944, when he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel Journey in the Dark, published the previous year. The Pulitzer recognized Flavin’s mature work as a novelist; by the time of the award, he had been working with Charles Greene on Spindrift for fifteen years, and the building had been the principal residential setting in which his writing life had been pursued.
The selection of Charles Greene as the architect for the substantial 1929 expansion and ongoing development of Spindrift reflected Flavin’s particular sensibility about architectural quality. Charles Greene was, by 1929, sixty-one years old, in the late phase of his architectural career, with his major Pasadena Peak Period work two decades behind him. He had moved to Carmel in 1916 with his family. His Carmel residence and studio at 13th Avenue and Lincoln Street had been completed in 1923-24. He had been working on the D. L. James House, “Seaward,” in the Carmel Highlands since 1918 — a project that would extend into the 1940s. He was, in 1929, the leading architectural figure in the Carmel artistic community, and the engagement of his services for the development of Spindrift placed Flavin’s house within the small circle of Carmel residences that bore Charles’s late-career architectural attention.
The 1929-1941 Engagement
The Avery archive’s dating of the Flavin commission as 1929-1941 indicates the duration of Charles Greene’s continuous engagement with Spindrift across twelve years. The dates correspond to the period during which Charles, working from his Carmel studio four miles to the north, made successive contributions to the building’s architectural character through new construction, alterations, additions, and ongoing design refinements. The engagement was not, on the available evidence, organized as discrete commissions with clear start and end dates, but as a continuing architectural relationship between Charles and Flavin in which contributions were made as the property’s needs and Flavin’s preferences evolved.
The 1929 start date placed Charles’s Spindrift engagement at exactly the same year as his last complete original commission — the John Langley Howard House at 86 Avenue Maria Road in Monterey, completed in 1929 (House 19 in this directory). The simultaneity is meaningful: 1929 was the year that Charles secured what would prove to be his last fully original architectural commission, and the same year that he began what would become his longest sustained late-career engagement with an existing building. The two projects together — the Howard House and the Flavin engagement — define the architectural transition from the period of Charles’s continuing original residential commissions to the period of his ongoing additions and alterations to existing buildings, which would constitute the bulk of his subsequent architectural production.
The 1941 end date marks the practical conclusion of Charles’s active architectural work on Spindrift, sixteen years before his death in 1957. By 1941, Charles was seventy-three years old, and his architectural production had substantially diminished in the years immediately preceding. The Spindrift engagement had carried him through the 1930s as one of the few sustained architectural commitments of his late career, with Flavin’s continuing patronage providing the kind of ongoing professional engagement that few of Charles’s other late-career relationships sustained.
The Library Addition
Among Charles’s documented contributions to Spindrift, the library addition is identified in the available historical record as a complete original design — new architectural construction integrated with the existing Gottschalk-designed envelope, executed entirely to Charles’s drawings and specifications. The library represents Charles’s most architecturally substantial contribution to the building, and on the assessment of the Greene & Greene scholarly community, it may rank as one of the most significant single architectural designs of his later years.
The library addition’s specific architectural details — its proportions, materials, interior detailing, and relationship to the existing English manor envelope — are not extensively documented in widely accessible published sources, and the principal documentary record of the design exists in the project drawings preserved in the Charles Sumner Greene Collection at the Environmental Design Archives at the University of California, Berkeley, and in the Greene & Greene Architectural Records and Papers at the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University. The Berkeley collection lists the Flavin project drawings under “Flavin, Martin [‘Spindrift’] Carmel Highlands CA 1929-1930,” with the more compressed date range suggesting that the principal Berkeley-archived drawings may date from the early phase of Charles’s engagement, with subsequent design work reflected in the Avery archive’s broader 1929-1941 dating.
What is established in the documentary record is that the library addition represented Charles’s architectural design in its entirety, that it was constructed during the early phase of his Spindrift engagement, and that it was the architectural contribution that Flavin himself most associated with Charles’s authorship of the property’s significant architectural character. Within the broader context of Charles’s late-career production — characterized largely by additions and alterations rather than complete original buildings — the Spindrift library represents the late-career equivalent of an original architectural commission: new construction at the level of design ambition that distinguished Charles’s earlier work, executed for a client willing to commission substantial new architectural work integrated with an existing residence.
The Garden Walls and Front Gate
In addition to the library addition, Charles Greene’s documented contributions to Spindrift include the garden walls and the front gate of the property. The garden walls — defining the spatial relationships among the residence, its associated outbuildings, and the broader seven-acre coastal site — were designed by Charles to organize the property’s outdoor architectural composition. The walls’ specific configurations, materials, and details are not extensively documented in widely accessible published sources, but their identification as a distinct documented Charles Greene contribution to the property indicates that he engaged with the landscape architectural design of Spindrift as well as its building architecture.
The front gate, which Charles designed as the principal threshold marker for the property’s cypress-lined entry drive, defines the visitor’s first architectural encounter with Spindrift. The gate, in its current granite-and-wrought-iron configuration, organizes the formal entry sequence — granite gate, cypress drive, manor house — that gives Spindrift its particular character of arrival. The gate is one of Charles Greene’s most visible contributions to the property’s broader architectural identity, and visitors to Spindrift encounter Charles’s design before they encounter any of the original Gottschalk envelope.
The combination of garden walls, front gate, and library addition, along with the unspecified additional contributions across the twelve years of Charles’s engagement, produced the architectural totality that Martin Flavin himself, in his correspondence with Randell Makinson, identified as Charles Greene’s substantial creation of the property’s significant architectural character.
The Flavin Letter to Makinson
The documentary record of Charles Greene’s contribution to Spindrift includes a letter from Martin Flavin to the Greene & Greene scholar Randell Makinson — the first Director of the Gamble House and the leading scholarly authority on the firm’s work in the second half of the twentieth century. In the letter, Flavin distinguished between Gottschalk’s role as the building’s original architect and Charles’s role as the figure who had, over the long period of years that followed, contributed almost everything of architectural value and distinction to the property, both inside and outside. Flavin’s identification of Charles as the property’s true creator, despite the architectural-historical fact that Charles was not the building’s first architect, represents one of the most explicit client-authored attributions of architectural authorship in the entire documentary record of the firm’s work.
The letter’s significance derives in part from its source. Martin Flavin was, by the time he wrote to Makinson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and an established literary figure with a sophisticated understanding of authorship, attribution, and the relationship between an original creator and a transformative subsequent contributor. His distinction between Gottschalk’s original authorship and Charles’s transformative contribution was not a casual statement but a considered judgment about how the property’s architectural character had actually been shaped. Flavin’s identification of Charles as the property’s creator reflected his sustained close working relationship with Charles across twelve years of architectural engagement, and his witness to the way that engagement had transformed the building’s architectural identity.
Makinson, receiving Flavin’s letter, incorporated its evidence into the broader scholarly understanding of Charles Greene’s late-career production. The letter’s documentary evidence has subsequently shaped the way the Spindrift commission is understood in the architectural-historical record — as a building whose original Gottschalk authorship is acknowledged, but whose substantive architectural character is attributable, on the client’s own testimony, to Charles Greene’s twelve-year transformation.
Charles Greene’s Late Career
The Flavin engagement defines, in many respects, the architectural character of Charles Greene’s late career. After the dissolution of Greene & Greene at the end of 1922, after his move from Pasadena to Carmel in 1916, after the completion of his own Carmel residence and studio in 1923-24, and after the long-running D. L. James House project beginning in 1918 in the Carmel Highlands, Charles’s architectural production had shifted decisively from the Pasadena Peak Period idiom of original residential commissions toward a Carmel-based practice characterized by extended client engagements, ongoing design refinements, and substantial integrations with existing buildings.
Within this late-career pattern, Spindrift represents the most extensively documented case of Charles’s contribution to an existing residential structure. The 1929-1941 engagement — twelve years of continuous architectural attention to a single property — exceeds in duration most of Charles’s earlier original commissions, and reflects a different model of architectural practice than the discrete-commission model that had defined his Pasadena Peak Period work. The Flavin engagement was, instead, a sustained architectural relationship between architect and client, with new design contributions made as the property’s evolving needs and the client’s continuing preferences directed.
The architectural production of Charles’s late career has been, historically, less recognized than the Pasadena Peak Period output that defined the firm’s broader reputation. The Spindrift library, the John Howard House, the continuing D. L. James House project, the Charles S. Greene House and Studio in Carmel, the Mortimer Fleishhacker Sr. House alterations and additions in San Francisco — these late-career projects, executed across the 1920s, 1930s, and into the early 1940s, constitute a substantial body of work whose architectural significance has only gradually been recognized in the scholarly literature. The Flavin commission’s documentary record — preserved in the Berkeley and Avery archives, and supplemented by Flavin’s own letter to Makinson — provides the most direct evidence available of how Charles’s late practice actually functioned and what it accomplished.
The Building Today
Spindrift remains in private residential use as one of the most significant oceanfront estates of the Carmel Highlands. The current configuration of the principal residence totals approximately four thousand three hundred square feet, configured as six bedrooms and six bathrooms, with various outbuildings on the seven-acre site. The English manor architectural language of the original Gottschalk design remains the building’s defining stylistic vocabulary; Charles Greene’s library addition, garden walls, and front gate remain integrated with that original envelope as the documented Charles Greene contributions to the property’s totality.
The property has had relatively few owners across the past century. Following the Flavin family’s tenure — which extended across Martin Flavin’s lifetime and the years of Charles’s engagement — Spindrift was held by subsequent owners through a series of generational transitions. A recent listing of the property described it as on the market for the first time in nearly fifty years, indicating that the most recent ownership tenure had spanned roughly five decades of single-family stewardship. The property’s continuing use as a private oceanfront residence has preserved the architectural character that Gottschalk and Charles Greene jointly produced.
The contemporary identity of Spindrift, in the broader cultural memory of Carmel residential architecture, identifies the property as one of the iconic oceanfront estates of the Highlands, with the seven-acre flat coastal site, the dramatic three-sided ocean views, the cypress-lined entry drive, the granite gate that Charles designed, the cypress groves that frame the residence, and the ocean bluff trails leading to tidepools and the secluded cove. The property’s architectural identity continues to integrate the original 1922 English manor with Charles Greene’s twelve years of subsequent design contributions, producing a residential composition that has remained substantially intact across a hundred years.
The Building’s Place in the Greene & Greene Story
The Martin A. Flavin House, “Spindrift,” occupies a distinctive position in the Greene & Greene catalog. It is the most extensively documented case of Charles Greene’s late-career engagement with an existing building. It is the longest sustained single-client architectural relationship of Charles’s late career, with twelve years of continuous design contribution. It is the property most explicitly attributed by its client to Charles’s architectural authorship, despite that author’s role being formally that of subsequent contributor rather than original architect. It is one of the principal late-career commissions through which the architectural character of Charles’s post-Pasadena practice can be evaluated.
The building also represents a particular kind of architectural authorship — the transformative engagement with an existing structure across an extended period — that the firm’s better-known Pasadena Peak Period work largely did not engage with. The Pasadena Peak Period was characterized by complete original commissions, executed within reasonable time horizons, with clearly defined start and end points. The Flavin engagement was something different: a continuing architectural relationship without a clear endpoint, in which new design contributions were made as the property’s evolving life directed, with the cumulative effect across twelve years producing a transformation that the original architect would not have recognized as his own building. Within the late-career pattern of Charles’s Carmel practice, this transformative-engagement model defined his architectural work in ways that the Peak Period vocabulary never had.
The commission also represents one of the best-documented examples of how Charles’s late practice integrated with the broader Carmel artistic community. Martin Flavin was, in 1929, a successful playwright; by 1944, he was a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. The cultural significance of his patronage, and the documentary record his correspondence preserved, contributes to the historical understanding of how Charles’s Carmel practice operated within the broader literary and artistic culture of the central California coast during the second quarter of the twentieth century.
Quick Reference
- Location: 171 Spindrift Road, Carmel Highlands, California 93923 (an unincorporated community south of Carmel-by-the-Sea, not within the city limits of Carmel-by-the-Sea proper)
- Original construction date: 1922 (by Charles H. Gottschalk, architect and builder)
- Charles Greene engagement dates: 1929-1941 (per the Avery archive cataloging “Martin A. Flavin House, Carmel Highlands, California, 1929-1941”; the Charles Sumner Greene Collection at the Environmental Design Archives at UC Berkeley lists drawings dated 1929-1930, suggesting the principal Berkeley-archived drawings reflect the early phase of Charles’s twelve-year engagement)
- Original architect: Charles H. Gottschalk
- Subsequent architect (1929-1941): Charles Sumner Greene, working from his Carmel-by-the-Sea studio
- Client: Martin Archer Flavin (1883-1967), American novelist and playwright; Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1944) for Journey in the Dark; author of plays including The Criminal Code (1929) and Children of the Moon (1923)
- Style: English manor house (original Gottschalk vocabulary)
- Documented Charles Greene contributions: the library addition (a complete original design integrated with the existing envelope, identified by the firm’s scholarly community as potentially one of Charles’s most significant works of his later career); the garden walls; the front gate of the property
- Site: approximately seven flat acres on the Pacific Ocean coastline of the Carmel Highlands; ocean views on three sides of the property; private bluffs descending to tidepools and a secluded cove; cypress groves on the property perimeter; cypress-tree-lined driveway from the granite gated entry to the residence
- Building configuration: approximately 4,300 square feet of principal residence; six bedrooms; six bathrooms; various outbuildings on the seven-acre site
- Documentary record: drawings and correspondence preserved in the Charles Sumner Greene Collection at the Environmental Design Archives at the University of California, Berkeley, and in the Greene & Greene Architectural Records and Papers at the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University; client correspondence from Martin Flavin to Randell Makinson explicitly identifying Charles Greene as the figure who contributed substantially everything of architectural value and distinction to the property over the long period of his engagement
- Distinction within the firm’s catalog: the longest sustained single-client architectural engagement of Charles Greene’s late career; the most explicitly client-attributed example of transformative subsequent architectural authorship in the firm’s record
- Period framing: Begun in 1929, the same year Charles secured his last complete original commission (the John Langley Howard House in Monterey, House 19 in this directory); completed in 1941, sixteen years before Charles’s death in 1957
- Current status: Existing, in private residential use; recently transferred from approximately fifty years of prior single-family ownership
Closing Reflection
In the architectural-historical record, attribution is usually a binary question. Either an architect designed a building, or someone else did. Either the architect’s name is on the building’s documentary record, or it is not. The exceptions to this binary — buildings where two architects shared substantial authorship, buildings where a subsequent architect transformed an original design beyond recognition, buildings whose architectural character is genuinely the joint product of consecutive contributions — are, in the historical literature, relatively rare and often contested.
Spindrift is one of the exceptions. The original 1922 building was Gottschalk’s. The 1929-1941 transformation was Charles Greene’s. Both architectural authorships are real. Both produced substantial portions of the building that exists today. Neither one alone explains the property’s architectural character. The library addition that Charles designed, the garden walls he composed, the front gate he placed at the head of the cypress drive, and the unspecified other contributions he made across twelve years of continuous engagement, transformed the original Gottschalk envelope into something that was Gottschalk’s still — but also Greene’s. Martin Flavin, the client who commissioned both architects’ work in succession, witnessed the transformation directly. His judgment, in correspondence with the firm’s leading scholar, was that Charles was the property’s creator. The judgment was not about who first put pencil to paper; it was about whose architectural vision had ultimately shaped the building that Flavin lived in.
This kind of transformative authorship — sustained, cumulative, integrated with an existing structure, executed across more than a decade — was not the Pasadena Peak Period model of architectural practice. The Peak Period had produced Ultimate Bungalows, original residential commissions, complete houses on previously undeveloped lots, designed and built within identifiable project timelines. The Flavin engagement was something else. It was an architectural relationship that continued for twelve years without a clear endpoint, in which Charles became, through accumulated contribution, the designer of a building that someone else had originally drawn. The Pasadena Peak Period had not made architects of this kind. The Carmel late period made Charles into one.
A library addition stands at Spindrift today, integrated into a 1922 English manor house, on seven flat oceanfront acres in the Carmel Highlands. It is, by Flavin’s testimony, Charles Greene’s design. It is also, by Flavin’s testimony, the architectural element that gave the property the significant character that distinguishes it from other oceanfront Carmel residences. Charles drew it in the early 1930s, in his sixties, working from his Carmel studio four miles to the north. The library has stood at Spindrift through the entire subsequent history of the property — through Flavin’s lifetime, through the Pulitzer Prize that Flavin won, through the long subsequent ownerships that have preserved the property in its essential architectural condition.
Charles Greene died in 1957, the same year his Carmel studio was photographed for the Greene archives at Berkeley. Spindrift had been his sustained late-career project for twelve years before he stopped working on it, and for sixteen years after, in his retirement from active practice, the library remained where he had drawn it, on the seven-acre site that the Pacific surrounds on three sides.
The building Charles did not originally design holds, today, his most extended architectural mark.