A few Craftsman homes around the country – all of which are looking for new owners – that have caught my eye this past week:
Reader Richard Muller – who notes that the pictures on the site show a Blacker House lamp reproduction, similar to one he built not too long ago – sends the following realtor’s listing for Charles Sumner Greene’s Arroyo Terrace home, and Thomas Houser suggests taking a look at the property using Google maps/satellite.
Oakholm, the original residence & living art of Charles Sumner
Greene was built on Arroyo Terrace in the Park Place Tract, an area now
considered to be the single greatest concentration of the Greene Bros
work. Built in 1902 as a 2 bd/1 ba structure, the home was then
expanded over a period of years to accomodate Greene’s growing family.
Comprised of 7 bedrooms (including the original studio), 4 ba, formal
dining room, 4 fplcs, butler’s pantry, and fabulous architecturally
-complimenting catering-style kitchen, the home was extensively
restored by Randell Mackinson in the late 1990’s, including the
construction of the vine-covered pergola, designed but never built by
Charles Greene. Considered as Charles Greene’s experimental laboratory,
the home incorporated interior colors and textures eventually used in
other Greene & Greene designs. Views of the Arroyo, San Rafael
Hills, and the San Gabriel’s (sic) are still enjoyed from many rooms
throughout the house & property.
My wife and I like to go to open houses on the weekends – in my own neighborhood and in the San Francisco Bay Area, where my parents live. Lately, I’ve been really disappointed with the tremendous lack of knowledge shown by so many real estate agents; it’s as if they don’t believe that the buyers and sellers find the provenance of a home and its architectural tradition important criteria. I was lucky enough to buy my home from an agent here in Sacramento who specializes exclusively in older Craftsman and California Mission bungalows in our neighborhood, but many people are not so lucky: in a volatile market, you get agents buying and selling themselves, doing just as much damage to old finishes and materials as any casual flipper interested only in flash.
I’ve heard agents counsel prospective buyers that beautiful red oak interior trim would be "livened up by a coat of varithane," or that "those old lathe walls really hold the heat – it’d be much more energy efficient to put in vinyl windows and replace some of this interior wall with sheetrock." One agent, within earshot of a seller obviously very attached to her immaculately restored 1919 brown shingle Western Stick home, asked a visiting couple if they’d thought which walls they’d tear down now that they didn’t need two small bedrooms for their kids any longer, and suggested a bearing wall heavily ornamented with sculpted plaster moulding and mahogany wainscoting that must have taken years to strip, sand and refinish. Still more agents have suggested using colored mylar to create a stained-glass effect in a 1909 Spanish Revival home, replacing beautifully-maintained period linoleum with laminate, and covering hardwood floors with carpeting.
Real estate agents: wake up! People who buy old houses buy them for a reason, and it is not sentimentality. They appreciate a higher-quality construction that you don’t often find in postwar homes, and they know what they want and they know how it should look. Educate yourselves a bit more – learn a bit about the local architectural tradition, and don’t rely on what you’ve picked up by osmosis to sell houses. You may be only in it for the money, but you are the guardians of your own town’s architectural heritage.
In architecturally-rich communities like the Bay Area, Portland Oregon, Pasadena and Los Angeles and to a lesser extent the urban neighborhoods and suburbs of Chicago, agents are by necessity as well-trained in architectural and design history as most undergraduate architecture or interior design students. However, this is the exception and not the rule, and you’re going to need to do a bit of work to match the knowledge of many of today’s well-educated buyers. There are dozens of good books on the subject out there; any good primer on residential home styles is the best starting place, probably, with books like Powell and Svendsen’s Bungalow series (bathrooms, kitchens, etc.) or Teena Crochet’s Bungalow Style also very useful.
Visit the local architectural salvage yards and check out the premium that all those discareded pieces are being sold at. Refuse to deal with flippers and the tear-down set. Cultivate friendships with cabinetmakers and handymen who appreciate old houses. Know the important architects of the area, the reasons behind neighborhood names, and why, for example, one shouldn’t put a huge mock-tudor in the middle of a neighborhood full of modest shingled bungalows. If you appreciate good taste, you’ll attract clients who have it as well. Your new mantra will be "why paint when you can refinish? why cover when you can restore? why remove when you can improve?," and eventually you will earn a reputation for sensitivity, knowledge and compassion to homes, buyers and sellers.
As regular readers might have guessed, I’m not a big fan of new homes. I feel uncomfortable in new buildings of all types – offices, stores, and especially houses. Growing up in Berkeley in the 1970s and 1980s, I never even guessed that such things as sprawling suburban development even existed – I had very little contact with the kinds of people who lived in such places. To me, then and now, there was something stifling and unnatural about living in a space that had not evolved, and while certainly the idea of building my own home some day has its attraction, I cannot honestly say that I would feel comfortable in a place without its own history.
Thus, it is with conflicted feelings that I read an email telling me about Atlanta’s Hawthorn Park development. Part of that city’s Kirkwood neighborhood (which itself was originally established in 1899), Hawhtorn Park is a 2003 development where the home plans are based on traditional (but slightly larger) Craftsman plans. Certainly this is not new; developers want to make money, and ever since the Craftsman revival of the early ’90s homebuilders have been offering Craftsman plans and even a few large(er)-scale developments like this have been built. All of the homes in the Hawthorn Park development sold out quite quickly after the initial offer in 2003, and many of them seem to be complete and lived-in at the present time. read on…
Mim Z. has a wonderful Flickr album full of Portland bungalow photographs – take a look.
Charlotte’s Fig Tree restaurant is housed in a well-maintained 1913 Craftsman bungalow that’s recently been redesigned to mimic its original look. The structure, known as the Lucas House, needed a 10-month renovation to put it back toward its original form. The new – almost purplish – dark browns throughout, wooden screens, and Arts & Crafts pottery make for a calm and serene setting, a great place to enjoy a fantastic rustic mushroom soup, osso buco served with a marrow fork and cooked to perfection,good spaetzle, and a lobster/scallop sausage that is to die for … I’m getting hungry!
other restaurants where you can dine in Craftsman style:
Please add the names and locations of Craftsman restaurants in your area to this thread! pictured: Chez Panisse in Berkeley
A good-sized collection of resources relating to Wright and his work in Marin County is available on the Marin County Free Library’s website, including photographs of the Marin Civic Center’s construction. A short clip of audio – Wright giving a lecture on the design of the Civic Center – is also available. via the Frank Lloyd Wright Newsblog
Stephanie Bloomfield and Scott Presnell bought this 1917 Tacoma bungalow in 1997, and have done a fine job of remodeling the kitchen and painting much of the home. Scott and Stephanie’s home is part of the recently-formed and so far almost-empty Craftsman Bungalow webring. I’d certainly like to see more pages linked through it!
Geri Hadley and Ron Coté’s bay area bungalow, built by Architect Robert Wylie, features some really beautiful tile throughout in decidedly non-traditional installations. "Usually," writes Wylie, "tile is an afterthought, a utilitarian choice, but here it was integral to the house’s connection with the visual grammar and the philosophy of the Craftsman movement."
The full text of the article, originally printed in Traditional Home magazine, is also available online.
the new Columbia/Tristar kids’ film Zathura, based on the childrens book of the same name, seems (at least from the trailer) to take place primarily inside a beautiful Greene-style Craftsman home. Take a look at the beautiful stained glass in the front door and the cloud lifts throughout the house! The film is directed by actor (and now director) Jon Favreau, who I have been told lives in a gorgeous Craftsman in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles.
What are some other films that feature Craftsman structures in supporting roles?