Greene & Greene’s "Ultimate Bungalows”

The style of NZ’s many California Bungalows derives from California. This seems obvious enough from the name, but you tell many people that and they’re astonished. Go figure.

In the years 1904-1913, the brothers Charles and Henry Greene combined Japanese aesthetic sensibility with English Arts & Crafts, injected robust American optimism and Californian informality and with it a new style was born that would jump the Pacific in less than a decade, and dominate New Zealand suburbs for twenty years.

I was looking for a video that might help explain the Greenes’s style, but couldn’t. Instead, there’s this:

‘Loblolly House,’ named for the Loblolly pines that surround the home, is a contemporary home designed by James Erler that is inspired by the Greene and Greene "Ultimate Bungalows."

It focuses on features rather than spaces, but it’s not a bad introduction.