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.

The Bandini House – Greene & Greene

The brothers Charles & Henry Greene first began work in California, but their first genuine California house came through the 1903 commission from Arturo Bandini, who ordered from them,

“a simple bungalow [as Thomas Heinz describes] that would express the charm of the central courtyard arrangement found in the early adobe structures that represented Bandini’s family roots…
    “The Greenes’ solution was a series of spaces, one-room deep, arranged around three sides of a spacious central court resplendent with trees, flower beds, footpaths and a central pool and fountain lush with sounds of running water.”

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.