The Gamble House, 1908. The birth of the California Bungalow style.

A CRITIQUE:

DESCRIPTION:

The Gamble House, also known as David B. Gamble House, is a National Historic Landmark, a California Historical Landmark, and museum in Pasadena, California, USA.

It was designed by brothers Charles Sumner Greene and Henry Mather Greene of the architectural firm Greene and Greene and constructed 1908–09 as a home for David B. Gamble of the Procter & Gamble company. 

Originally intended as a winter residence for David and Mary Gamble, the three-story Gamble House is commonly described as America's Arts and Crafts masterpiece. Its style shows influence from traditional Japanese aesthetics and a certain California spaciousness born of available land and a permissive climate. The Arts and Crafts Movement in American Craftsman style architecture was focused on the use of natural materials, attention to detail, aesthetics, and craftsmanship. (Wikipedia)

(photo: Charles and Henry Green)

(photo: Martin Green)

CRITIQUE:

On a beauty scale of 1-100 (100 being 100% beautiful) this house is about 70% beautiful.  It is more utilitarian in style and nature.  It's more like a Jeep than a Cadillac or Ferrari in its appearance of beauty.    It is still very neat and the amount and quality of variety, interest and construction are some of the highest of any residential home.  The style is a rugged mash of Swiss and Japanese styling.
The repeating (the house is big enough to enable the, normally low-interest, wood elements to become decorative as the quantity of use increased) wood elements in the rafters, the shingle siding, the windows and its many and varied roofs, give it a decorative quality, which is where this home gets most of its beauty from.  It has a nice symmetrical balance to the gestalt using asymmetry in the particle modules, the right side being two covered porches and the opposite being two stories of rooms.
Besides its inherent beauty, it gets a lot of its value from being the first home of the American Craftsman style, from which the California Bungalow rose.  Many of the later homes of the Bungalow style were imbued with more beauty.

See the link below for more images:
http://www.houzz.com/ideabooks/5488347/list/Must-Know-Modern-Homes--The-Gamble-House