The Mrs. Howard F. Mundorff House is the only Greene & Greene commission documented in California’s Central Valley. The firm’s residential portfolio runs from Long Beach in the south to Berkeley and Woodside in the Bay Area, with the densest concentration in Pasadena and a handful of outliers along the coast — Carmel, Santa Barbara, Ojai, San Diego. Fresno does not appear elsewhere on the list. The Mundorff House, completed in 1917 at 3763 East Balch Avenue, stands alone in that respect: it is the firm’s documentary footprint in the agricultural heart of the state.
It is also a building that does not look much like the firm’s other work. The Fresno County historic register describes it as a one-story house in a Colonial-style vocabulary, with a basic U-shape plan and exterior brick. There is no shingle. There are no projecting rafters in the manner of the Ultimate Bungalows. There is no clinker brick foundation work. There is no Craftsman porch with timber brackets. The Mundorff House was, at its construction, something different — a brick Colonial-style residence in a city building rapidly during the 1910s, in a style the firm did not often work in. The attribution carried in the firm’s own records is to Henry Mather Greene specifically, and by 1917 the question of which brother drew which commission had a sharper answer than it had in earlier years.
Henry Greene in 1917
By 1917 the Greene & Greene partnership was no longer operating as it had during the Peak Period. Charles Sumner Greene had relocated to Carmel-by-the-Sea — the move had taken place by 1916 — and his architectural practice, while continuing under the partnership name on commissions of mutual interest, had effectively become a Carmel-based studio focused on a smaller, more private set of projects in the Monterey Peninsula and elsewhere along the Northern California coast. The Pasadena office continued to operate under the Greene & Greene name, but its day-to-day work was Henry’s. The formal dissolution of the partnership would not come until 1922, but in 1917 the practical dissolution was already five years deep.
The HMG attribution on the firm’s record of the Mundorff commission identifies the project specifically as Henry’s. This is consistent with the broader pattern of the firm’s late-partnership work: residential commissions outside the Monterey Peninsula were generally executed from the Pasadena office, under Henry’s direct hand, regardless of which brother’s signature appeared on the partnership’s letterhead. The Mundorff House — a Fresno residence with no Carmel connection — fits this pattern. The Fresno County historic register’s description of the house as “designed and built by brothers Charles and Henry Greene in 1917” reflects the standard local convention of crediting the partnership; the firm’s internal records, with their HMG marker, reflect the actual division of labor.
A Colonial Vocabulary
The architectural choice of a Colonial-style brick house was, for Henry Greene in 1917, less of an anomaly than it might appear. The firm had always been more stylistically flexible than its Craftsman reputation suggested. Henry himself, in his 1911 design for the Pasadena School District Longfellow Elementary School, had worked in a Classical Revival vocabulary entirely different from the contemporaneous Craftsman residences on his drafting board. A 1917 Colonial-style brick house in Fresno represents another of Henry’s stylistic excursions — not a departure from his architectural identity but a manifestation of one of the registers in which he was prepared to work when the program asked for it.
The Colonial Revival was, by 1917, one of the dominant residential styles of the American upper middle class. The published architectural press of the period — Architect & Engineer, The Western Architect, the residential pattern books — gave it consistent attention. The style’s appeal in 1917 Fresno would have been straightforward: it was nationally fashionable, it was associated with a kind of dignified refinement, and it responded well to the climate considerations of the Central Valley, where masonry construction performed thermally better than the lighter timber framing of coastal Craftsman residences. The Fresno County historic register’s brief description — one-story, U-shape, brick — is consistent with a Colonial Revival house planned for the Central Valley summer: a single floor that could be more easily cooled than a two-story residence, a U-shape that wrapped around a sheltered outdoor space at the rear, and brick walls thick enough to moderate the daily heat cycle.
The house’s plan, U-shape around what was likely a courtyard, also signals an architect thinking about the indoor-outdoor relationship in a way that had been central to the firm’s California practice from the beginning. A Pasadena Craftsman bungalow’s deep porches and broad eaves were one expression of that thinking. A Fresno Colonial brick house with a sheltered U-court was another. The vocabularies differed. The architectural concern with integrating residence and outdoor living did not.
The Client
The commission is documented in the firm’s records under the name Mrs. Howard F. Mundorff. The convention follows the same pattern observed elsewhere in the partnership-era portfolio: the architect’s records identify the project under the wife’s name, while public registers typically use the husband’s. The Fresno County historic register identifies the building simply as the Mundorff Home, and earlier published records refer to “Howard F. Mundorff” as the head of the household whose family occupied it. As with the 1911 Lena W. Huston House and the 1912 Mary Maud Earle Apartment Building, the firm’s internal documentation appears to have specifically registered the wife as the active design client.
The Mundorff family was, in early-twentieth-century Fresno, one of a substantial number of agriculturally connected upper-middle-class households building distinguished residences in the city’s growing eastern neighborhoods. The Huntington Boulevard area, where Balch Avenue is located, became one of Fresno’s most architecturally significant residential quarters during this period, accumulating Craftsman bungalows, Italian Renaissance Revival residences, Spanish Revival houses, and the occasional Colonial Revival statement. The Mundorff House was one of the latter, and it remains identifiable today as a contributing example of the period’s eastern Fresno residential architecture.
Why Fresno
The question of how a Fresno commission reached the Greene & Greene office in 1917 does not have a clear documentary answer. The firm did not advertise. It did not solicit work outside its established networks. Its Pasadena practice was sustained through the recommendations of existing clients and the broader social networks of Pasadena’s resort and country-house community. A Fresno commission would, in the ordinary course, have come through one of those networks: a Pasadena client with a Fresno relative, a winter visitor to Pasadena who lived the rest of the year in the Central Valley, a personal acquaintance of one of the brothers, or an introduction through a real estate or banking intermediary.
In the absence of specific documentary evidence about how the Mundorffs reached Henry Greene, the connection is most plausibly understood as one of those personal or social referrals. Pasadena and Fresno were connected, in the 1910s, by railroad lines and by the social networks of California’s increasingly mobile professional and agricultural classes. Wealthy Fresno residents wintered in Pasadena. Wealthy Pasadena residents had business interests in the Central Valley. The architectural commission for a substantial residence on East Balch Avenue likely traveled along one of these lines. The Mundorffs hired Henry Greene because they had heard, from someone they knew, that he was the architect to hire.
A Century in Fresno
The Mundorff House remains standing at its original address on East Balch Avenue. It is identified in the Fresno County Library’s compilation of historic sites in Fresno County as a noteworthy example of the period’s residential architecture, attributed to the Greenes and dated 1917. It has not received the level of scholarly attention that the firm’s Pasadena commissions have. There is no published monograph on the building. The drawings, if they survive, are presumably in the firm’s archive at the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University with the rest of the firm’s records, but the Mundorff commission has not been a focus of the secondary literature on Greene & Greene.
What the building offers, instead, is a quiet documentary presence: the only Greene & Greene house in Fresno, the only Greene & Greene commission in California’s Central Valley, executed in a Colonial vocabulary unusual for the firm, in the year that Henry Greene was operating the Pasadena office largely on his own. It is not a tour-stop building. It is a working residence in a working Fresno neighborhood. It has been there for more than a century.
The Building’s Place in the Greene & Greene Story
The Mundorff House occupies an unusual geographic position in the Greene & Greene catalog. There are no other Fresno commissions, no Bakersfield commissions, no Modesto or Stockton or Sacramento commissions documented in the firm’s portfolio. The Central Valley appears, in the firm’s residential record, exactly once. That singular Central Valley commission is at 3763 East Balch Avenue, was completed in 1917, and was executed in a vocabulary the firm did not generally work in.
This makes the building, in some respects, a kind of test case for what Greene & Greene was capable of doing when it stepped outside its core stylistic territory and its core geographic region. A 1917 Henry Greene Colonial brick residence in Fresno is, by definition, not a Craftsman bungalow, not a Pasadena commission, and not a Peak Period Ultimate Bungalow. It is what Greene & Greene produced when it produced something else, somewhere else, for somebody else. The fact that the building has survived a hundred and nine years on its lot, and that it remains identifiable in the Fresno historic record, is evidence that whatever the firm produced in this register was produced well enough to last.
It is, finally, a reminder that Henry Greene was a versatile architect operating across a broader stylistic range than the firm’s reputation suggests. The same hand that drew the Gamble House drew Longfellow Elementary School in Pasadena and the Mundorff House in Fresno. The hand was the same. The buildings were not.
Quick Reference
- Location: 3763 East Balch Avenue, Fresno, California
- Date: Designed and built 1917
- Architect: Henry Mather Greene (HMG attribution per the firm’s records; the Fresno County historic register credits the partnership)
- Style: Colonial-style brick residence
- Plan: Single-story, U-shape configuration
- Construction: brick exterior
- Distinction: the only Greene & Greene commission documented in Fresno and in the Central Valley
- Period framing: Later Partnership era (1912–1922), one year after Charles Greene’s relocation to Carmel-by-the-Sea, with Henry running the Pasadena office largely on his own
- Current status: Existing, identified in the Fresno County Library’s compilation of historic sites in Fresno County
- Documentary record: Standard partnership-era project file in the Greene & Greene archive at the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University
Closing Reflection
There is something specific about the absence of a category. Greene & Greene built across Southern California, the Bay Area, the Monterey Peninsula, and a handful of coastal outliers. The Central Valley, with its agricultural wealth and its rising mid-sized cities, would have been a plausible market. The firm did not work there. Except once.
The Mundorff House is the exception. A single one-story brick Colonial-style residence on East Balch Avenue, at the eastern edge of the city of Fresno, executed in 1917 by Henry Greene’s Pasadena office, for a family whose Pasadena connection has not been preserved in the published architectural record. It is the firm’s evidence that in 1917 a Fresno commission was, at minimum, possible, and that when one came, Henry Greene took it.
The building is not famous. The client is not famous. The style is not the style for which the firm is famous. What the Mundorff House does have, after a century, is its presence on a residential block in eastern Fresno — the only Greene & Greene house anywhere in California’s vast inland valley, still standing, still doing what houses do, which is to say sheltering whoever, at any given moment, is living inside it.