Gamble House – Greene & Greene

The ‘Arts & Crafts’ movement of the late-nineteenth century celebrated fine craftsmanship at at a time when the machine was taking over. 

For some it was a last-gasp attempt to hold off what they saw as the “ugliness” of the coming machine age.  For others, like Frank Lloyd Wright, it required recognising “the machine is here to stay,” and using  the machine to better ends, producing new forms for a new age rather than simply “reproducing with murderous ubiquity forms born of other times and other conditions and which it can only serve to destroy.”

The influential Charles Ashbee, who founded the Guild of Handicrafts in London in 1888, said the main issue of the Arts & Crafts movement is “one of production . . . not so much how things should be made, but what is the meaning behind their making.”

There was some beautiful work produced at the height of the movement. 

  The grandest of these was undoubtedly the Gamble House by brothers Charles & Henry Greene--built in Pasadena California in 1908, and one of the finest examples of what became known as the ‘California Bungalow’ style that, with its relaxed plans, sheltering gables, craftsman timberwork and horizontality thrust out to the landscape came across the Pacific and swept away the dank, dark villas in which New Zealanders had up to then been suffering.

Perhaps the culmination of this apogee is the stunning staircase and stained glass window in the entrance hall, the staircase loosely echoing Chinese timber assemblies.