architecture

• ellsworthstorey.com

  Born in Chicago in 1879, Ellsworth Storey grew up to become one of the most important architects of Seattle. He was influenced very strongly by the Arts & Crafts movement (Frank Lloyd Wright’s own Chicago Arts & Crafts Society was instrumental in Storey’s early socialization as an architect), but integrated a a wide variety of European and North African styles into his work. The strong influence of the Swiss chalet-style home is especially noticeable in many of the Seattle residences he designed.

  Recently, Hillel decided to document his own passion – the Ellsworth Storey house he owns – and his recent hobby, the life and work of the man who built it. If you live in the Northwest, you probably already know about Storey’s influence and have seen some of his houses; if not, take a few minutes to visit ellsworthstorey.com and learn about a tremendously underappreciated American craftsman.
   

• BYO Gamble House (or Taliesin)

  

  For the gajillionaires among you who aspire to build your own Gamble or Irwin house: the Library of Congress’ wonderful American Memory Project includes in its voluminous archives a number of high-resolution building plans of these and other great Craftsman homes, furniture and more. And thier archive of Frank Lloyd Wright drawings, plans and photographs is absolutely immense – I spent several sleepless hours poring over the photographs alone.

• May on Greene

  The indefatiguable Tim May has compiled a very complete list of Greene and Greene-built structures – not just existing buildings, but those that have been demolished as well. from the site:

  The Greene Brothers, well known architects of the Arts and Crafts era, are famous for the "Ultimate Bungalows" which are finely crafted homes
  built around the turn of the century. Perhaps, the most famous of "ultimate bugalows" is the Gamble House in Pasadena. The majority of their homes are in Pasadena and the surrounding towns. There are others in Ojai, Santa Barbara, the San Francisco Bay Area and one in Sacramento.The primary feature of this site is the list of structures pages. If you have information to add to this list please notify me. I am a great fan of the Greenes and wanted to establish this web presence as a resource for others interested in their work and style.

• Campbell Home in Costa Mesa

  Coast Magazine has a nice profile of Tim and Carol Campbell’s home in Costa Mesa, including plenty of photographs. Their Stickley and Roycroft furniture fits perfectly into the house designed around it and their large collection of Native American art and artifacts. The house is large, though, and way out of scale to the rest of the neighborhood, but it looks like it’s been there longer than anything else around it – beautiful by itself but maybe a bit out of place where it is?

• Boettcher Mansion

  

  William and Arthur Fisher’s 1917 Boettcher Mansion is – after the wildlife, of course – a centerpiece of the Lookout Mountain Nature Preserve in Golden, Colorado. Jefferson County is quite proud of the site, and has kept it up well; a selection photographs are available online. Boettcher Mansion is open to visitors and available for special event rental. As a 1920 Jefferson County publication noted:

  The one important house that seems most perfectly to harmonize with the Colorado mountains is the residence of Charles Boettcher on Lookout Mountain, designed by Fisher and Fisher. In the Arts & Crafts style, it surmounts the hill of which it seems a crowning member. In fact, it is next to impossible to ascertain at certain points of the structure, where the natural formation ends and the architecture begins. The Mansion is almost a part of the earth and rock.

• A Craftsman Home

  Richard Silverstein has an excellent gallery of photos of his own 1906 Craftsman home in Seattle’s Madrona neighborhood. Much of the furniture in his photographs is made by gifted craftsman Tom Stangeland, whose work we profiled on HH not too long ago.

• Before the Architect

  Before the Architect offer a range of educational resources and consultation & design services to prospective homebuilders, including introductory tutorials for particular architectural styles, including an excellent short description/introduction to the Craftsman style. As the site notes,

  You’ve come to the right place if:
  1. You want to be involved actively in the plans for your next house or major addition.
  2. You have been-there, done-that with architects, and prefer not to go back-there and do-it-again.
  3. Your dream home is your next home.
  4. You have planned, clipped, and sketched for years, and now it’s time to sort it out and get going.

• neighborhood: Westwood Park

  Greg Clinton, Board President of San Francisco’s Westwood Park Association, tells us about one of the earliest and most interesting & architecturally important planned residential neighborhoods in the city – an area many outsiders know only for Louis Mullgardt‘s entry gates.

  Development of Westwood Park began in 1917 by Baldwell and Howell under the architectural supervision of Ida McCain. Westwood Park was the first planned subdivision in San Francisco, consisting of 686 single-family homes mostly in the California bungalow style.  Each house has its own unique detailing. Some bungalows have an Arts & Crafts influence, while others have elements of Spanish Mission or English Tudor.  Several public green areas are dispersed throughout the neighborhood, which provide a feeling of spaciousness and nature, rare in a dense and crowded city like San Francisco. Historic gates and pillars that mark the main entrances to the Park were restored by the Westwood Park Association in 2004.  On the inside, most of our homes have open floor plans, lots of windows and natural light, extensive gumwood trim, custom built-ins, and numerous architectural detailings.
  

  Visit our Westwood Park photo album to see some of the remarkable and varied Craftsman, Deco and Mission homes of this neighborhood!
  

• Wright’s Carr Home Destroyed

  On November 8, an 88-year old Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house in Grand Rapids, Michigan was demolished to make room for a new single-family home. The Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy would have preferred to save the home from demolition, but not made aware of the demolition plans until after the building had been torn down. According to Wright scholars and others who examined the property, however, the house was in especially bad shape and restoring it would have been a very serious undertaking. William Allin Storrer, author of The Frank Lloyd Wright Companion, said of the property:

  The building deserved to be torn down,
  and crying over its destruction brings to mind the story of the
  shepherd boy who cried ‘wolf’ once too often. We must
  preserve that of Wright which truly represents his organic
  architectural principles, and the W.S. Carr house did not even when
  built, though it had the master’s signature on the plan.
  

  photograph: Kevin Byrd / Associated Press / Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy

• What is a Bungalow?

  Kerry Phillips, one of the founders of the Sacramento Bungalow Heritage Association, which tirelessly protects the many beautiful Craftsman homes in my own neighborhood of midtown Sacramento (as well as the rest of the historic neighborhoods of our city), has an excellent short essay defining this sometime-contentious word up on the SBHA site.