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Greene & Greene

The Thomas Gould Jr. House

On a gently sloping site of just under two acres in the hills above Ventura, with views across the coastal hillsides toward the Pacific Ocean and the Channel Islands, stands the Thomas Gould Jr. House. The house was designed in 1924 by Henry Mather Greene, working from his Pasadena office in the third year of his independent solo practice following the formal dissolution of Greene & Greene at the end of 1922. The clients were Mabel Gould — a Stanford-trained botanist who collaborated directly with Henry Greene on the home’s design and floorplan and with the landscape architect Theodore Payne on the grounds — and her husband Thomas Gould Jr. The house cost approximately thirty thousand dollars to build in 1924. It is the only Greene & Greene house ever built in Ventura. It is one of the last Greene & Greene houses ever built in Southern California. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2005. It is widely considered one of the best examples of Henry Mather Greene’s independent solo work, and one of the most documented Greene & Greene designs in the firm’s catalog.

For a hundred years — from its 1924 completion through October 2025 — the house had only one ownership. The Gould family, beginning with Mabel and Thomas Gould Jr., held the property across four generations, through the Great Depression, two world wars, the long postwar transformation of Southern California, and into the twenty-first century. The house sold for the first time in its history in October 2025, for approximately three and a quarter million dollars. The 2025 sale closed a remarkable hundred-year chapter and opened the building’s second.

What made the Gould family’s century of ownership remarkable was not just its duration but what it preserved. The house retains, after a hundred years of continuous occupation, an extraordinary number of its original architectural elements: the redwood siding and window casings, the gable roof with truncated ends, the small front gable that reads as a dormer, the original oak and maple floors, the leaded glass china cabinet, the ceiling moldings, the custom bookcases and built-in desks, the carved entry mirror that is documented as the only piece of furniture in the house designed by Henry Greene himself, the Tiffany art glass, the custom redwood moldings and baseboards, and the two Batchelder tile fireplaces — both made by the Pasadena ceramicist Ernest Batchelder, whose tiles became one of the defining decorative materials of the Southern California Arts and Crafts movement.

The House

The Thomas Gould Jr. House is a two-story Craftsman residence in the firm’s late-period California bungalow vocabulary, executed by Henry Greene in 1924 with the design discipline of his solo practice and the materials and detailing of the firm’s Pasadena tradition. The structure is wood-framed. The exterior is clad in redwood siding, with redwood also used for the window casings. The principal roof is gabled, with truncated ends — the slight modification at the gable corners that gave Henry’s late-period work some of its distinctive silhouette — and a small gable on the front facade that reads, from a distance, as a dormer.

The current configuration of the house, after a documented 1980s expansion, totals approximately four thousand two hundred and ninety-nine square feet of interior space, configured as five bedrooms and four to five bathrooms, on the original lot of one and three quarters acres. The original 1924 footprint was smaller than the current envelope; the second story expansion, which the Greene & Greene scholar Randell Makinson designed in the 1980s, increased the upstairs accommodations beyond what Henry’s original drawings provided. The principal rooms downstairs — the spacious living room, the cozy adjacent den, and the window-lined dining room — retain their original 1924 configuration and detailing.

The architectural language is Arts and Crafts in the firm’s Pasadena tradition, modulated by what one description has called “subtle Japanese influence” — the proportional relationships and the integration of indoor and outdoor space that the firm had been developing across two decades of California practice. The oversized windows that line the principal rooms were specifically designed to dissolve the visual boundary between interior and the surrounding landscape; the views from the major windows reach across the property’s mature plantings to the Pacific in the distance.

The house cost approximately thirty thousand dollars to build in 1924 — a substantial sum at the time, comparable to or exceeding the construction budgets of many contemporary Pasadena residences, and reflecting the level of architectural finish and the program scale of the commission.

Mabel Gould, Botanist and Design Collaborator

Mabel Gould was, in addition to being the wife of Thomas Gould Jr. and the principal client of the Greene commission, a Stanford-trained botanist. She had studied botany at Stanford University in the late 1890s — Stanford had been founded in 1885 and was, at the time of her studies, one of the principal new American universities for women’s higher education in the sciences — and she brought to the design of the Ventura property a level of botanical and landscape literacy that distinguished her from most architectural clients of the period.

The documentary record indicates that Mabel collaborated directly with Henry Greene on the home’s design and floorplan. This is a more specific claim than the dual-naming patterns observed in earlier Pile B entries — the Lena W. Huston House, the Mary Maud Earle Apartment Building, the Mrs. Howard F. Mundorff House — where the firm’s records named the wife but the documentary evidence of her actual design participation was largely circumstantial. In the Gould commission, Mabel’s collaboration with the architect is identified in the historical record of the building, and her name appears in the property’s contemporary identification — as the Mabel and Thomas Gould Residence — alongside her husband’s.

She also collaborated with Theodore Payne on the landscape. The collaboration with Payne was, in light of her Stanford botany training, the kind of professional partnership between two specialists in the same field that the average architectural client could not have offered. Mabel knew her plants. She knew Payne’s work. She knew what a California-native landscape needed to be, and she worked with Payne to shape the grounds of the Gould property accordingly.

Theodore Payne and the Landscape

Theodore Payne was, by 1924, the most important advocate for California native plants in the state. Born in 1872, he had emigrated to California from England in the 1890s and established a nursery and seed business in Los Angeles that became the leading source of California native plant material for landscape design. His advocacy for native plants — a position that ran against the dominant landscape practice of the period, which favored imported European and Mediterranean species in California gardens — would, decades later, become recognized as a foundational element of the California native-plant movement that emerged more broadly in the second half of the twentieth century.

The collaboration between Payne and Mabel Gould on the Gould property’s landscape produced a grounds composition that was, at the time of its planting in 1924, ahead of its general moment in California residential landscape design. The majestic oaks and sycamores that now mature on the property — and that frame the architecture from every viewpoint on the lot — were planted by Payne by hand. The hand-stacked stone walls and pathways that organize the grounds were constructed without mortar, in the dry-stack tradition that characterized the most refined California landscape work of the era. The two original ponds — one now configured as a Zen garden with a fountain, the other planted with water lilies — gave the property its water features.

The grounds today are a certified natural wildlife preserve, with the native plantings continuing to attract monarch butterflies, hummingbirds, and the broader fauna of California’s pre-suburban ecology. The oaks and sycamores planted by Payne in 1924 are now centenarian specimens. The hand-stacked walls and pathways still organize the visitor’s experience of the property a century after their construction. The collaboration between Mabel Gould and Theodore Payne, in the year that Henry Greene was completing the house at the center of the property, produced a landscape that has aged into one of the most fully realized California native-plant gardens in private ownership.

The Interior Detailing

The interior of the Gould House is one of the most extensively documented examples of late Henry Mather Greene residential detailing. The firm’s design philosophy — that every architectural element, from the structural framing to the smallest piece of cabinetry, should be considered as part of a coherent whole — is visible throughout the house’s principal rooms, modulated by the more economical scale and budget of Henry’s solo practice as compared to the Pasadena Peak Period.

The most distinctive single piece in the house is the carved entry mirror. The mirror is documented as the only piece of furniture in the house designed by Henry Greene himself — a specific identification that distinguishes it from the broader category of architectural elements that the firm’s late practice produced as part of the building envelope. The mirror was carved to Henry’s specifications and installed in the entry as a fixed architectural fitting. It survives in place.

The two Batchelder tile fireplaces, in the living room and the den, anchor the house’s principal social spaces. Ernest Batchelder, working from his Pasadena studio across the same decades that the Greene firm was practicing, had become by 1924 the leading California producer of Arts and Crafts ceramic tiles. His earth-toned, hand-pressed tiles, often featuring relief-carved imagery of California landscape and natural elements, were a recognizable presence in the firm’s Pasadena residential commissions. That the Gould House contains two Batchelder fireplaces signals the level of finish that Mabel and Thomas Gould Jr. were prepared to commission, and the sustained connection between the two principal Pasadena Arts and Crafts producers of the period — Greene and Batchelder — across a project a hundred miles north of their shared home city.

Throughout the principal rooms, the firm’s signature elements appear: leaded art glass, including a particularly notable leaded glass china cabinet in the dining area; custom redwood moldings and baseboards milled to Henry’s specifications; built-in bookcases and desks designed as part of the architectural envelope; ceiling moldings that organize the upper edges of the rooms; light sconces designed to integrate with the broader interior; and the wood floors — oak and maple — that grounded the rooms then and ground them now. The combination of materials and detailing was, even within the Greene & Greene catalog, ambitious for a commission of this date and program.

Henry Greene in 1924

By 1924, Henry Mather Greene’s solo practice was three years old and substantially established. The Pasadena office, operating under his sole proprietorship as Henry M. Greene, Architect, had recovered from his 1921–1922 illness and the formal dissolution of the partnership at the end of 1922, and was producing residential commissions across a range of programs and budgets. The 1923 Lloyd E. and Rachel Morrison House at 1414 Alhambra Road in South Pasadena was a small Craftsman cottage of approximately thirteen hundred square feet. The 1924 Thomas Gould Jr. House in Ventura was a substantial residence of nearly twice that size on a lot more than ten times larger. Both buildings came from the same office in successive years.

The Gould commission represents Henry’s solo practice working at the upper end of its residential output. The combination of factors — a substantial site, an engaged co-designing client in Mabel Gould, a budget that allowed for a fully detailed Arts and Crafts interior with Batchelder tile fireplaces and Tiffany art glass, and a landscape collaboration with Theodore Payne — produced a commission that gave Henry the opportunity to demonstrate, on his own and outside the partnership context, what his architectural practice was capable of when working at full capacity.

The result, as the Wikipedia entry on the building summarizes, has been recognized as one of the best examples of Henry Greene’s independent work — a particular distinction in a career that included substantial collaborative production with his brother Charles during the partnership years. The Gould House is, in this sense, the building that most clearly demonstrates what Henry could do alone.

It is also one of the last Greene & Greene houses to be built in Southern California. By the mid-1920s, the firm’s residential output was tapering significantly. Henry’s commissions in the later 1920s would be increasingly limited in number, and his work would shift toward smaller programs and alterations to existing buildings. The Gould House, in 1924, was a major late commission — substantial in scale, complete in program, and executed at a level of architectural finish that Henry’s solo practice would not often have the opportunity to match in the years that followed.

The Makinson Restoration

In the 1980s, the Thomas Gould Jr. House was the subject of a substantial restoration and modest expansion led by Randell Makinson — the first Director of the Gamble House, a practicing architect, and the leading Greene & Greene curator and scholar of his generation. Makinson had spent his career studying, documenting, and advocating for the firm’s residential work; his books on the Greene brothers had defined the scholarly understanding of their output; his curatorial work at the Gamble House had established the Pasadena Ultimate Bungalow as a recognized landmark of American architecture. That Makinson personally led the 1980s work on the Gould House is among the strongest available endorsements of the building’s significance within the broader Greene & Greene catalog.

The Makinson work was respectful of the original architecture in the way that only a Greene & Greene specialist’s intervention could be. He updated the kitchen — modernizing systems while complementing the original 1924 architectural language. He added a four-car garage with a half-bathroom, scaled and detailed to integrate with the existing residence. He expanded the second story, adding accommodation that the original program had not provided, again working within the architectural vocabulary of the original building. The result was a house that gained functional capacity for late-twentieth-century family living without losing its 1924 identity.

The Makinson work itself has now passed into the building’s history. Forty years after the 1980s expansion, the kitchen and the upstairs primary bathroom that Makinson worked on are again candidates for further updating — the natural cycle of any house that continues to be lived in. The 2025 sale identified these as opportunities for the new owner. Makinson’s expansions of the second story and the garage remain, and the kitchen he updated is now itself a piece of the building’s recorded twentieth-century history.

The National Register Listing and the Property Today

In 2005, the Thomas Gould Jr. House was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, recognized as a property of national and state significance. The listing brought formal federal preservation recognition to a residence that had, until that point, been quietly held in private family ownership without broader public recognition. The Mills Act tax provisions, available to owners of properties listed on the National Register or on equivalent state or local registers, are now applicable to the Gould House and provide ongoing financial support for the property’s continued historic preservation.

The property today consists of three separate parcels covering four assessor’s parcel numbers, totaling approximately one and three-quarters acres, stretching from the gated entry on Lynn Drive at the upper end of the property to Foothill Road at the lower end. The configuration provides potential for additional development on the property — a guest house, a separate office, or a pool — within the constraints of the historic preservation designation. The 2025 sale, after a hundred years of single-family ownership, transferred the property at a price of approximately three and a quarter million dollars — a figure that reflected both the building’s historic significance and the broader real estate context of Ventura County in 2025.

The Building’s Place in the Greene & Greene Story

The Thomas Gould Jr. House occupies a particular position in the Greene & Greene catalog. It is the only Greene & Greene house in Ventura, in the same way that the 1917 Mrs. Howard F. Mundorff House is the only Greene & Greene house in Fresno — a singular geographic outlier in the firm’s predominantly Pasadena-centered residential record. It is one of the last Greene & Greene houses built in Southern California, marking a closing point in the firm’s regional residential output. It is one of the most extensively documented Greene & Greene houses in the firm’s catalog, with the Gould family’s century of single-family ownership having preserved the building’s architectural integrity to an unusual degree. It is one of the best examples of Henry Mather Greene’s independent solo work, distinguishing him from the partnership-era collaborative production that defined the firm’s better-known Pasadena residences.

It is also a piece of evidence about how the firm’s residential practice continued to function in the years following the partnership’s dissolution. Mabel Gould’s collaboration with Henry on the design, Theodore Payne’s collaboration with Mabel on the landscape, Ernest Batchelder’s tiles in the fireplaces, and Henry’s careful attention to the carved entry mirror that he designed as the single piece of furniture in the house — all of this was the kind of work the late Greene & Greene practice was capable of when the program supported it. The Gould House is, in 1924, the building that supported it.

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Closing Reflection

A hundred years of single-family ownership is a rare thing in any residential building. A hundred years of single-family ownership in a substantial Arts and Crafts residence on nearly two acres in coastal Southern California, with an original Theodore Payne landscape, two Batchelder tile fireplaces, Tiffany art glass, a carved entry mirror designed by the architect himself, oak and maple floors that have not been replaced, and a 1980s restoration led by the leading Greene & Greene scholar of the era, is something rarer still. The Thomas Gould Jr. House, on its sloping lot above Ventura, accumulated all of this in the same building, on the same site, across the same hundred years.

That kind of accumulation does not happen by accident. It happens because a series of consecutive owners — the four generations of the Gould family — decide, individually and collectively, that what they have inherited is worth keeping. The decisions are not always architectural. They are often family decisions, financial decisions, decisions about where the children will grow up and where the parents will retire. But the architectural consequence of consistent family decisions to maintain the property as it was — to keep the redwood siding, to repair the leaded glass when it needed repair, to commission Randell Makinson when modernization could no longer be deferred, to leave the carved entry mirror in its place, to let the oaks Theodore Payne planted by hand grow into their second century — is a building of unusual completeness.

Henry Mather Greene drew the house in 1924. Mabel Gould worked on the design with him. Theodore Payne planted the trees. Ernest Batchelder fired the fireplace tiles. The Gould family lived in it for a hundred years. Randell Makinson restored what needed restoring in the 1980s. The National Register listed it in 2005. Some new owner, in October 2025, became the second family in the building’s history to call the Thomas Gould Jr. House home.

The accumulation continues.

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