A Visit to the Gamble House, an Arts & Crafts Gem in Pasadena

Historic preservation takes commitment, money, and owners who care.

W hile I was in Pasadena, Calif., a few weeks ago, I visited the Gamble House, the Greene & Greene home commissioned in 1908 by David and Mary Gamble, Proctor & Gamble heirs from Cincinnati. Then, Pasadena was little more than a town but already renowned in the Midwest and Northeast for its ideal climate and clean air. I haven’t walked through the house in years but wanted to see it again and present it as a house that’s a work of art to be adored, protected, and interpreted. How well are its masters stewarding it?

Two architect brothers based in Pasadena, Charles Sumner Greene (1868-1957) and Henry Mather Greene (1870-1954), worked together to design houses in Southern California in a warm and luscious Arts & Crafts style that defines the movement’s aesthetics and reflects them at their most exquisite.

The Gamble House itself is probably the most complete and best-preserved Arts & Crafts style house in America. The Greene brothers designed not only the house but the furniture, lighting, stained glass, textiles, cabinetry, fireplaces, and built-in elements. They conceived every exterior and interior detail and supervised about a dozen local craftsmen in realizing their designs.

The house is a beauty and an art treasure, something which David and Mary Gamble understood. They were Anglophiles and, in tracing the Gamble genealogy, learned that the family had a motto: “Vix ea nostra voco.” It means “I scarcely call these things my own.” It appears on objects such as a portable desk or a box for letters to be posted, personal objects they used each day. They saw the family motto as a pact with the future, knew they were commissioning art, and took their roles as patrons seriously.

They spared no expense, and, let’s face it, the Gamble House is a luxury enterprise. This isn’t architecture for Everyman. And while the place is mostly handcrafted, the Greenes did not oppose machines. Where the design required machine work, it happened — discreetly.

I can write about art history or the sensual experience of walking through the house. I’ll take whatever’s sensual first and foremost since that’s what turns an appreciation of art into a love of a work of art. My small group of three met an informed volunteer docent on the front porch, chatted about the wide, front door, mostly stained-glass, and then entered a cool, calming hall, a cocoon lined with deep honey-colored polished teak wood.

Inside, the stained-glass composing much of the door came alive. It’s an abstract, Japanese-inspired scene of trees, proposing that we’re home. We’ve left the outside world behind. Filtered light and the wood’s glow warm the soul. A breeze from a layout aimed at ventilation cools the body.

The space calms, but it’s not boring. It’s not platitudinous, either, like rarefied, ornate Victorian interiors or stark chrome and glass New York interiors that proclaim an abhorrence of warmth. The staircase on the right is grand, but grand like a sequoia tree. It ascends as if from the earth, but we’re not hobbits. It’s rigorously geometric and looks modern. It speaks shape language. It confidently tells us it’s sturdy, strong, and reliable.

The stained-glass, interior lanterns, and friezes are lovely but, to me, the most refined pleasure comes from the woodwork. It’s not a symphony of wood — too loud — but more like chamber music, relaxed, intimate, different woods making a whole that soothes. When I looked at the wood, I thought of a violin. It’s meant to be caressed. From the wood in the house comes magic.

The Greenes understood the qualities of different wood species. Before MIT, they were teenaged wood masters, learning the craft of wood at a technical school. They used ironwood, hard and dense like taut muscle, where fingers pulled on panels. Softer wood such as sugar pine muffled sound. They picked woods for their beautiful grains. Headboards and footboards in the bedrooms are black walnut. Redwood panels in the living room were carved with landscape friezes, the grain supplying atmosphere and the hint of distant hills. It’s gauzy, dreamy Tonalism in wood. Whistler, not a great fan of wood, might have found the look attractive had he thought of it himself. Vermilion and ebony were used as touches for contrast.

I’m not going to recreate the docent tour. It was an hour long. I think our docent was superbly trained and loves what she does, as are all the best docents. They’re not only doing the work for free, but I’ve found the best to be as informed as holders of advanced art degrees. Many probably are. She kept the group moving and stuck to talking points. My questions were both esoteric and possibly didactic but, hey, I taught art history for years. She stayed exactingly on message. Afterwards, I looked up what I wanted to know.

Everything in the house has the touch of the architects and the client. The Gambles came to Pasadena in part for its warmth and clean, dry air. Cincinnati, I assume, is no fun in the winter, and it’s packed and commercial. The house is an indoor/outdoor place. The lot is on top of a hill overlooking an arroyo. Plenty of windows and porches on both floors maximize breezes. Even the shoe drawers are ventilated. We saw the entire house, including the upstairs bedrooms, the bathrooms — which were forward-looking for 1908 — and the kitchen. The Gambles are presences throughout. Their sons’ bedrooms were designed for growing boys and have a cabin feel. I loved the house’s celebration of their good taste.

The Gamble House is the rare “gesamtkunstwerk,” or total work of art, an architectural design strategy that integrates all features of, say, a house in a single style executed, in its purest form, by a single artist. This isn’t a modern invention. Robert Adam and Pugin’s unified home style using the concept of a single design vision — down to the china, tea towels, and loos — has a heyday in Art Nouveau and Arts & Crafts taste. In Europe, Victor Horta’s house from 1901 in Brussels and Hill House near Glasgow, designed and decorated by Charles Rennie Macintosh in 1902, are examples of a singular vision.

In the U.S. the Glessner House in Chicago, H. H. Richardson’s masterpiece, is superbly intact. Manitoba, the Russel Wright house in the Hudson Valley, is a Modernist time capsule. A few Frank Lloyd Wright houses are unsullied. Wright, like Greene & Greene, his contemporaries, liked to design both exterior and interior, including all fittings and furniture. It takes a patron who’s a devotee, even a fanatic, both to want a unified look and to hire a designer who might, like Wright sometimes was, become an aesthetic tyrant.

Times when eclecticism rules don’t accommodate a “gesamtkunstwerk” approach and, of course, a house that starts as a total work of art might not stay that way. All it takes is for the original owners to die. Heirs divide things, sell the place, and that’s when walls tend to come down, a Jacuzzi goes in, a 48-inch TV screen replaces a sculpted frieze, and natural mahogany is painted white because the wife decides, “Oh, it’s too dark in here.”

Before long it’s not a “gesamtkunstwerk” but a “gesichtsbremse,” literally translated from German as a “face break” but really means something so ugly, so revolting, that it must have been dragged through muck and yuck by a galloping horse. Art historians, even Americanists such as myself, needed a certified reading knowledge of German to graduate. It’s one of my favorite ways of saying “hideously wrecked.”

David and Mary Gamble lived in the house until they died in the 1920s. Mary’s unmarried sister, Julia, lived there until she died in 1944. Spinsters are among the best conservationists because they don’t like change. Julia, as collateral family, might have felt like the eternal guest, too. In any event, she saw the house as a temple to David and Mary. The Gambles’ son and his family moved there after she died and stayed until 1966.

We learned that the Greene brothers, both MIT architecture graduates, were originally inspired by Swiss chalet design but that the Japanese Pavilions at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 and the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in 1904 were mind-blowing for them. In both, the Greene brothers saw the antidote to Beaux-Arts piles bulging with columns, capitals, cupolas, and scrolls. Japanese homes and tea houses seemed more inviting and livable, and they privileged wood, the ubiquitous American material. California faces the Pacific, not Europe. It’s not about Paris or Ancient Rome.

We spent time in the back patio, which is soothing and of a piece with the house. A small pond is surrounded by handsome slate. Vines grow horizontally in bands between the brick steps, inserting a nice touch of green where I didn’t expect one. The brick in the low wall surrounding the patio is called swell-belly brick. It’s over-baked brick that bulges and pops like a cake. The wall undulates, too. It all makes for a whimsical, comfortable setting. The garden is not a wild, profuse English country-house garden but understated and informal.

When I think about museums — and the Gamble House is an art museum — I think about governance and finances. I also think about preservation. When the Gamble family wanted to move in the mid 1960s, they first looked at selling the place in the conventional way: Sell to the highest bidder, pack, say goodbye, and leave what was once a home to the mercies of the new owner.

The last Gambles heard so often the dreaded, “Oh, it’s too dark in here” from open-house lookers that they took another route. The City of Pasadena got the house and property as a gift — nice to be Proctor & Gamble heirs — and the University of Southern California, which has an important architecture school, assumed responsibility for maintenance, programming, and finances.

This worked fine for 50 years. I think it was a good arrangement in 1966. Historic preservation was foreign to Southern California except for the old missions. Even back East, it wasn’t baked in the art culture. Penn Station had just been demolished, after all. The Gamble family wanted a safeguard against incompetent or corrupt municipal control, both conceivable, and chose a university.

Now, universities are diffuse operations, and in my opinion their principal concerns are racial quotas, fundraising, and new buildings. I’d add masking robust students, too, as a cause of supreme, dogmatic importance.

The Gamble House’s support groups are its docent council and its conservancy group. It’s got a big, dynamic Friends group. The three are good organizers and fundraisers. Together, USC, the volunteers, the city, and the current Gambles agreed to empower the Gamble House Conservancy with oversight and power over money as a 501(c)(3). Things got a little messy last year after the conservancy said USC hadn’t coughed up all of the Gamble House’s endowment money. Wouldn’t be surprised it the conservancy was right — universities and colleges are so grabby today. In any event, the big news is that the players sorted things out, and a local court recently made the new structure official.

The Gamble House’s annual budget is about $1 million. Its endowment supports about 40 percent of its spending, leaving the rest for fundraising, admissions income, the shop, and events. This takes loyal donors and volunteers but, as I’ve said before, it also takes leadership. Ted Bosley is retiring this year after 32 years as the museum’s director. He stewarded the place through its 2004 renovation, strategic planning, and the new governance. He’s a Greene & Greene scholar who works closely with The Huntington, which owns the Greene & Greene firm’s archives. During his years there, a million people have visited the house.

Bosley is a steady hand who has both stewarded and shepherded the house. I can attest that renovations of historic buildings are not easy. “Do no harm” is easier said than done. The renovation he led is masterful. He would not have been tempted to do anything that wasn’t thorough and subtle, but had he tried something wacky, there would have been riots in Pasadena. People there see the Gamble House as precious. That’s Bosley’s good work, too.

The renovation focused on the exterior. The house has always been maintained, but, by 2004, it had experienced almost a century of weather. Diseased wood and rot were removed from over 250 Douglas fir rafter tails and beam ends, at times using dentist equipment to be thorough. The redwood-shake cladding was restored and repaired. Some of the wood was replaced with old-growth fir. Preservatives have improved over the years, so modern ones were used. Window screens and moldings were treated. The roof got a good renovation, too. It was a $3.5 million project funded by a capital campaign Bosley led. The house does not look spanking new. Rather, it shows the patina the Greenes predicted.

Historic houses do not always fare as well. The Blacker House, another Greene & Greene gem in Pasadena, suffered one assault after another in beleaguered silence. When the last Blacker died in 1946, her will provided that the house and its Greene & Greene interiors be sold together. Her executor ignored her wishes and maximized value as well as, coincidentally, his fee. A “yard sale” depleted the house of most of its furniture. The executor also sold most of the land and the outbuildings, destroying the large formal garden.

In 1985, a later owner sold the house to a Texas rancher and his New York antiques dealer partner. They harvested and then sold nearly fifty original light fixtures, stained-glass, and doors as individual items. By then Arts & Crafts design was high style. Light fixtures brought $100,000 a pop. It was no less than a cultural crime.

Mr. Texas Art Rustler sold the house a few years later without ever having lived in it. Now, the current owners are buying land back and restoring the garden. Some of the furniture and glass has returned. I think this couple, Harvey and Ellen Knell, are heroic.

Greene & Greene built about 140 buildings, almost all in Southern California and most in Pasadena. The firm dissolved in 1922, with Charles moving to Carmel and delving into Buddhism and Henry practicing architecture solo.

It was a treat to see the Gamble House looking so beautiful and with a promising future. I’ve written, I think, twice about The Huntington, but Pasadena, a city of only 140,000, is culturally rich in other respects. In a couple of weeks I’ll write about the Norton Simon Museum. The Tournament of Roses, held almost every year since 1890, was a must-see TV event in our house when I was a child, even before we had a color television. My view of art is expansive and includes floats and flora.