Ah, at last a real look at the house itself, not just its parts.
When this Craftsman Style house was first built in1908 everybody else with money was building Queen Anne Victorian styled houses.
This drawing is of a Queen Anne Victorian house built in San Francisco at the same time the Greene brothers were building the Gamble House in Pasadena. Imagine the two houses side by side. How super-modern the Gamble House must have seemed back then. There are no high vertical lines, no soaring towers, no busy details and gingerbread trim everywhere, just a simple horizontal feel along with plain earth colors. Above all, in all its details, was a hand-craftsmanship that could not be duplicated in mass production. That was an idea shared by Art Nouveau, a contemporary artistic movement.
The Craftsman Style, also called Mission Style, became a movement in the United States thanks to this house. It encouraged originality, simplicity of form, local natural materials, and the visibility of quality handicraft.
Smaller houses imitating features of the Gamble House ennobled the modest homes of the rapidly expanding middle class. Those house became the "Craftsman Bungalow" style. That style flourished until the Depression of the 1930's.
Notice on the Gamble House picture the "natural" sidewalk to the rear. The mound on the front lawn was built up so that from the sidewalk along the street pedestrians could not see the brick carriage road in front of the house, and it would all look like a continuous lawn.
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