Across the hall, at the southwest corner of the house, the dining room
projects into the garden like a pavilion, surrounded on three sides by
the rear terrace and nature. A pair of pocket doors, with art-glass
panels in a segmented cloud design, can be closed to give privacy to
the room. The room is paneled in Honduran mahogany, creating a darker
and more formal environment than the teakwood living room and
hallway. A massive, built-in sideboard on the south wall is the focal
point of the room.  Cabinets and drawers, with panels chosen for their
beautiful grain patterns, are symmetrically arranged under a T-shaped
group of golden-yellow opalescent-glass windows in a design of a
blossoming vine with blood-red flowers.  A hanging leaded-glass
chandelier, framed in mahogany, casts a soft, golden light on the
table, itself a masterpiece of engineering and further evidence of the
Hall brothers' significant contribution to the design evolution of the
Greenes' work. Compared with the Blacker dining furniture, and even
the earlier Bolton pieces, the Gambles' dining-room suite is sober,
though this had not been Charles Greene's intent.  His sketches show
that he had envisioned the chairs and table with elaborate inlays of
metal wire and contrasting woods. The Gambles may have felt that it
was too much of a display (or that they would be without dining-room
furniture for too long, waiting for it to be completed); ultimately
they confined the decorative inlays to the guest-bedroom and
master-bedroom furniture. There the Greenes excelled, and the
guest-bedroom pieces rank among the most exquisite they created.
Indeed, the guest-room writing desk was a favored form for Charles; he
re-created it later in rosewood, with a different, more elaborate
inlay detail.  The guest-room wall sconces are remarkable, not only
for their intrinsic beauty -- delicate art-glass roses leaded into
flared mahogany frames -- but for the contrast with the frosted-glass
shades originally used in every other bedroom in the house.

The upper, family bedroom level of the Gamble house takes on a more
relaxed ambience than the public spaces downstairs. Color and surface
contrast play a larger role than wood, and each room has plaster walls
painted a different muted earthtone. Port Orford cedar, a soft wood
with an even, satin-like reflective quality, is the dominant trim and
door material, though its subdued grain gives it a monotone appearance
compared with the exotic hardwoods of the public spaces.  Stickley's
Craftsman furniture was specified for the boys' bedroom and the family
guest room, but the master bedroom and Aunt Julia's room merited the
Greenes' furnishings.  The master bedroom pieces, especially, create a
compositionally balanced and coordinated environment similar to that
of the living room. Three rugs, each with a simple geometric design,
set off the functional areas of the room.  These include the entry;
the fireplace area, with an inglenook space and a day-bed bench (an
overhead light is bright enough for Mr. Gamble to read by); and the
main body of the room, with two beds, chiffonier, dressing table, and
desk. Throughout the house, but especially in the master bedroom, it
is the sparseness of decorative detail that imbues the space with
particular beauty.  Restrained and subtle decorative inlays grace the
furniture: tiny bits of semiprecious stone, vermilion, and fruitwood,
depicting plant fragments on fields of black walnut.

The single-room space for the third level was originally labeled
"attic."  On the final presentation drawings, the space was
incorrectly renamed "billiard room."  The Gambles, who were a sober
Presbyterian family that did not believe in such idle amusements, used
it for storage.  Despite this, the attic is a superb example of
structure put to use, both functionally and aesthetically.  The
Greenes exhibited a convincing ability to do this, but it is in the
simplicity of an undecorated space that structure can best preside as
beauty. Two king-post trusses support the roof, each Oregon-pine
timber selected for its clear, straight grain, lack of defects, and
appropriate seasoning.  All edges were milled to a radius that
produced a softened appearance -- perhaps to suggest ages of gentle
wear -- and hand-sanding and oiling enhanced the details and natural
characteristics of each piece of wood. Each post and beam, each rafter
and corbel, is treated with precisely equal respect, making for a
unity of effect that belies the labor-intensive construction.  The
iron straps and wedges that bind the truss systems are functional, the
pragmatic counterparts of the analogous decorative straps in the
living room. In the final analysis, function and analogy are both
means to an end: beauty.

Simultaneous with the Gamble house, the firm was also involved with
alterations to Dr. William Bolton's house for its tenant, Mrs. Belle
Barlow Bush; the addition of a bath and closet to the Theodore Irwin
house; alterations to the interior of an Oaklawn house for architect
G. Lawrence Stimson; and dining-room alterations and bookcases for the
West California Street house of Mr. Lon F. Chapin.  On November 19,
1907, it was reported in the Pasadena Star that Charles Sumner Greene
had offered to contribute his design services for the erection of a
"casino" on Pasadena's Monk Hill (Charles's drawings more
picturesquely describe it as a "Shelter for Viewlovers").  In a design
spirit similar to the Oaklawn waiting station (1906), the robust
stone-and-timber shelter was designed to seem like a natural outgrowth
of the hilltop, looking from the moment it was finished as if it had
always been there.  It was adopted by the community, and locally
became the site of the annual Independence Day picnic.  The structure
was demolished in 1923 to clear the site for a school.  Charles Greene
likely spent much of the spring of 1908 on the building sites of the
Gamble and Blacker houses.  The commission to design a house for
William J. Lawless, which also came into the office during this
period, likely fell mostly to Henry.  It was a relatively modest
residence compared with the estates on which the brothers were
spending so much of their time, and the uncomplicated but inventive
design (now significantly destroyed) recalled the Greenes' simpler
work of 1904 and 1905.  Spacious porches and balconies were more
prominent than on their earlier houses, however.  A long terrace of
stone and wood crossed the breadth of the front elevation, and the
depth of the overhanging eaves and distinctive profiling of the beam
ends were carried out using the newest Greene and Greene design and
construction methods.  Lawless was happy with his house, and in
November 1908 persuaded his neighbor and friend, George H. Letteau, to
allow the Greenes to design and supervise the construction of a
pergola and brick walk to connect their adjacent houses.

In the late spring of 1908, the Greenes were asked to develop a series
of sketches for a winter residence in the resort town of Nordhoff, in
the idyllic Ojai valley north of Los Angeles. The clients were Charles
Millard Pratt and Mary Seymour Morris Pratt, of Brooklyn, New
York. Like his father, Charles Pratt, Sr., the younger Pratt was an
officer of the Standard Oil Company, which had purchased the Charles
M. Pratt Company, developer of the internationally successful lighting
kerosene "Astral Oil."28 The senior Pratt had cultivated in his family
a love of wood architecture in the wild by building one of the first
rustic "camps" in the southwest Adirondack Mountains in 1870.  The
family vacationed at the cabin every summer until 1905, and in 1909
the younger Charles Pratt purchased his own "camp" on Little Moose
Lake in the Adirondack League Club preserve near Old Forge, New York.
He and Mary also owned a farm in Connecticut, a city residence on
Clinton Avenue in Brooklyn, and a Shingle Style vacation house called
"Seamoor" (a play on his wife's middle name) on one thousand acres
near Glen Cove, Long Island.  The younger Pratt maintained his
father's honest affection for wood architecture in spectacularly
beautiful settings, and when the son announced his intent to build in
"the Ojai," his chosen architects could be assured of a serious and
appreciative client.  Under what circumstances the Greenes were chosen
is not precisely known but the Pratts may have seen their work on
their occasional visits to Pasadena.  It is also interesting to note
that Mrs. Pratt was a Vassar College classmate (1880) of Caroline
Canfield Thorsen, a soon-to-be Greene and Greene client and sister of
Nellie Canfield (Mrs. Robert R.) Blacker.

Unlike the Blacker and Gamble houses, the fourteen-acre site chosen by
the Pratts for their home had no near neighbors and no artificial
conditions governing its development or the design of the house to be
located on it.  Further, there were abundant natural features to which
the actual positioning of the house could be related.  If the Blacker
and Gamble houses represented the high art of suburban domestic
architecture of the period, the Pratt house and grounds signify their
rural counterpart, with an altogether less formal design program for
the house and furnishings that reflected, in design and decoration,
the open countryside on which it would be built.  The principle
defining characteristic of the property was a steep ravine, or
barranca, that ran from the foot of the Topa Topa mountains to the
valley below, and gave the house its name, Casa Barranca.  Preliminary
sketches for the house, drawn in June 1908, show a rigid, L-shaped
plan, with a small, one-story sleeping porch appended at a
forty-five-degree angle onto one end of the house.  The Greenes soon
recognized, however, that the views and the hilly topography on the
edge of the property's ravine were conducive to a more informal plan.

By September 14, 1908, the basis of the Greenes' final design had been
worked out. It featured a radically informal, V-shaped plan (that
maintained the original angled porch) and interior volumes of various
heights, all under a constantly changing roofline that echoed the rise
and fall of the mountains behind it. The chimneys and foundation would
be constructed of the sandstone boulders that comprised the local
geology, and the exterior of the house would be sheathed in stained
split-redwood shakes.  Since Charles Pratt had become part-owner of
the nearby Foothills Hotel, he and his wife took most of their meals
and entertained there. Accordingly, they did not require spacious
public rooms for socializing in their new house. Indeed, they
reportedly used the house only as "sleeping quarters."34 A single room
served as entry hall, reception area, and living room at the pivot
point of the V-shaped plan. The beamed ceiling of the seven-sided
room, and the light-colored, maple flooring, give the space the
informal feel of an Adirondack "camp," minus the rustic hickory bark
typical to the idiom. Similar to the Cole and Blacker houses, the
entry also serves as a direct passage to the rear terrace through a
bank of french doors opposite the front doors.  Also like the Blacker
entry hall, the space takes on a sitting-room atmosphere, heightened
by the inclusion of a fireplace and built-in inglenook bench in the
northwest corner. Immediately to the right of the entry, the
near-cubic space of the dining room is taller than the other rooms,
but compact in area, and clearly expressed on the exterior by a raised
portion of roof.  The dining room's paneling above the picture rail is
redwood, stained subtle hues of red and green and softly lighted by a
tall, octagonal chandelier of mahogany and frosted glass with a
delicate vine design trailing through its panels. The pattern of
chevrons in the fireplace bricks evokes American Indian textile
designs, and is faintly echoed in the chevron of the maple
floorboards.

The two-story wing on the north contains four bedrooms, each with a
sleeping porch, balcony, or other independent access to the
exterior. The guest bedroom -- a small chamber behind the chimney wall
of the living room -- is elegantly distinguished by a pair of
leaded-glass transom windows that borrows enough light from the
hallway to show the design of a branch, green leaves, and ruby-red and
pink blossoms on a field of green and yellow streaks.  The design of
the fireplace, normally a symmetrical feature in the Greenes' houses,
is set off-center to maximize the efficient use of flue space within
the chimney stack that serves the bedroom and the living room. Farther
along the hallway, a pair of french doors, designed and installed by
Henry Greene early in the life of the house, were added to replace the
original casement windows, thereby correcting a defect in circulation
logic that had not allowed for access to the rear terrace from the
bedroom wing of the house.  (More recently, french doors have been
added to the kitchen for the same reason.)  On the north end of the
plan, the charming lower-level sleeping porch, originally without
walls or screens, angles to the east to provide privacy from the motor
court on one side and take advantage of the mountain views on the
other.  The roof of the bedroom wing provides adequate shade to the
upper level but also gave the Greenes an opportunity to expose an
elaborate structure of tenoned-and-pegged queen-post trusses on the
interior of the northerly, upper-level bedroom. On two sides of the
room, the white-cedar ceiling slopes with the drop of the roof,
creating an intimate cabin-like ambience.

Mr. and Mrs. Pratt occupied the finished house for the first time
during the winter of 1911, and the dining-room furniture was delivered
personally by Peter Hall in February of that year. Carefully scaled to
complement the room sizes, the furniture is noticeably more compact,
and less formal, than the corresponding Blacker or Gamble
pieces. Reflecting the size constraint of the room itself, the table
was not designed to expand. Living-room furniture was not designed
until in 1912, and reflects the Greenes' increasingly decorative
design vocabulary. In contrast to earlier pieces, the living-room
chairs are wider, more accommodating, and less rigid than the chairs
for the Gambles and the Blackers. And, if possible, they are more
sumptuous in their use of materials. An eight-sided library table --
small compared with others they had executed -- was designed and
constructed with exceptionally beautiful pieces of fiddleback mahogany
in the top. An exquisite drop-front desk, also for the living room,
was decorated with inlays of contrasting woods in the form of a
venerable and gnarled oak tree, and was considered worthy of a rare
detail photograph by Leroy Hulbert, who was commissioned by the
Greenes in about 1915 to document their most important work. The
desk's chair nominally relates to the simple formality of Charles
Rennie Mackintosh's ladderback pieces for Windyhill (1901), but its
silver inlays and wave-like perforations give it a design identity
that is comparatively more decorative than architectural.

Though Charles Greene's hand was clearly at work in the design of the
Pratt house, Henry Greene and Peter Hall were left to see that the
house was built according to plan. Charles departed for England just
prior to the beginning of construction, though even after his return,
and for many years following, his brother was the one to return to
supervise the ongoing maintenance of the house, quietly tending to its
needs.

The last of the large and elaborate wooden houses designed by Greene
and Greene, the William R. Thorsen house in Berkeley, California, was
produced nearly simultaneously with the Pratt house -- the
presentation drawings were dated only two weeks apart in March
1909. The Thorsen house was designed for an urban lot that offered
virtually none of the siting possibilities that the Greenes had been
able to choose from while planning the Pratt's Ojai house. It also
offered fewer options than were typically available to them even in
Pasadena. The client was William Randolph Thorsen, a lumberman who had
married the daughter of his employer, and the sister-in-law of his
colleague, Robert Blacker. Like Nellie Canfield Blacker, the younger
Caroline Canfield Thorsen, known as "Carrie," had inherited a
comfortable sum from her father's lumber business in Manistee,
Michigan, which, ironically, had been founded by William Thorsen's
father, John. A native Norwegian with a strong love of the sea, John
Thorsen had incorporated the Stronach Lumber Company in Manistee in
1872 and had hired John Canfield as its president. His young son,
William, served as secretary-treasurer. By the 1890s, the Michigan
timber business was slowing down, and by 1900 William Thorsen had left
for California to establish a new concern, the Westside Lumber
Company, near the town of Tuolumne in the goldmining region of the
remote foothills of the Sierra Nevada range. He began to reap the
benefits of the West's building boom, and in 1903 built for his family
a 4,200-square-foot house designed by New York architects Emory and
Emory. Called "Thorwald," the house (extant today) is strikingly
similar to a Long Island bungalow designed by K. C. Budd that Thorsen
may have seen illustrated that year in a popular magazine. It is
difficult to imagine that Carrie Thorsen could be fully content with
outpost life, after having become accustomed to a high level of social
activity in Michigan. After a few years, Thorsen transferred his
company's headquarters to San Francisco, and in 1908 he purchased
property for a home in Berkeley, near the University of California. It
was a corner lot on fashionable Piedmont Avenue, a broad, tree-lined
thoroughfare that had been planned by Frederick Law Olmsted in 1865.

The choice of Charles and Henry Greene to design the Thorsens'
Berkeley residence may seem unusual on the surface. This quiet,
bayside academic community had developed an enviable and justified
reputation for artistic and progressive housing, much of it for the
university's professors. Berkeley favored such well-respected, locally
based architects as Bernard Maybeck, Louis Christian Mullgart, Julia
Morgan, John Galen Howard, and Ernest Coxhead. The desire to bring the
Greenes four hundred miles to the north to execute a complex
residential commission was almost certainly driven by sentiment (and
possibly a desire for enhanced social standing). The will, and the
financial resources of Caroline Thorsen, moved the project
ahead. Mrs. Thorsen was aware of the Greenes' work in designing and
building her sister and brother-in-law's house in Pasadena's Oak Knoll
tract. Family and professional ties between the Thorsens and the
Blackers were quite strong, and one way to demonstrate and honor that
closeness was for one family to emulate the other's living
environment. It also seems more than coincidental that Caroline had
graduated from Vassar College in 1880 with Mary Pratt, and that within
months of each other, twenty-eight years later, they would both become
threads in the web of client connections that fueled the Greenes'
classic years of production.

Although the design of the house seems to have been a collaboration of
the two brothers at the height of their classic period together, the
Thorsen house is visually distinct from the Pasadena houses of the
same period. This is primarily because of radically different local
conditions in Berkeley that dictated how its form would need to
function.  Cool weather and foggy skies, generated frequently by
marine conditions, suggested for the house a steeper roof pitch,
shallower eaves, and avoiding cantilevers that would cast deep
shadows.  This promoted a more vertical orientation of the main mass
of the house as compared to the well-defined horizontality of the
Pasadena houses. Sleeping porches were less practical in the cooler
climate; in their place, the Greenes designed uncovered balconies for
enjoying the spectacular westward views of San Francisco Bay and the
Golden Gate.  Stairs, not a formal drive, proved to be the appropriate
approach to the front door in the pedestrian-based, urbanized setting
of Berkeley, and the garage was hidden from arriving visitors, beyond
the service wing on the north property line.  But despite these
fundamental differences, the house is unmistakably the Greenes'
work. The articulation and softening of timbers, the "lift" motif in
the windows and doors, and the distinctive use of clinker bricks as a
bold foil for the exterior of split redwood shakes, are
characteristics of their finest Pasadena work that easily and
effectively migrated to the north.  The Thorsen house stood out among
its mostly stucco neighbors, though especially next to the concrete
house immediately to the south, which had been designed by Julia
Morgan in 1905 (now the heavily remodeled Chi Psi fraternity chapter).
Even if it had been built in the North Berkeley hills, where more of
Bernard Maybeck's unstained-shingle houses could be found, the
Greenes' design for the Thorsens would still seem out of place, posing
as an elegant temple of high-art craft among the charming and quirky
shingled cottages for which the city is better known.  Charles
Keeler's book, The Simple Home (1904), had suggested homebuilding and
decorating guidelines for Berkeley hill dwellers that were based on
the use of uncomplicated local materials and a palette of hues taken
from the surrounding land.  The Greenes chose to put precious
materials in the service of polished craft, a significantly different
approach to arrive at an Arts and Crafts aesthetic.  For this reason,
the house was, and still is, a local paradox, but one that underscores
the broader theoretical distance that existed between the work of
mainstream Arts and Crafts practitioners and the Greenes' renowned
structures from 1907 to 1910.  It is a paradox that continues to
challenge the definition of Arts and Crafts architecture.

The L-shaped plan of the Thorsen house was dictated by the shape of
its corner lot and by the desire for a private and sheltered garden
space.  Such a plan had the added benefit of creating a natural
separation between the family's chambers and the service areas of the
house, an important feature in the Thorsens' formally run household.
The shape of the plan nestled into the right angle of Piedmont Avenue
and Bancroft Way at the low end of the sloping lot. So the house would
not loom too large on the west property line, and to avoid significant
excavation of soil on the east end of the property, the Greenes
limited the wing on Piedmont Avenue to two stories in height, then set
the facade back from the street some thirty-five feet.  This still
produced an imposing mass to the passerby, but one that belied the
9,200-square-foot interior space. The elevated bulk of the west wing
was also visually lightened by fitting the facade with large picture
windows.  Raised planting beds on either side of the massive brick
entry stairs beautify the buffer between the house and the sidewalk
and promote an ambience of seclusion.  The entry stairs are far more
complex than originally presented on the final drawings, which showed
a straight run of steps to the door. Charles produced an alternate
design, but not until March 1910, a year after the beginning of
construction.  At the top of the stairs, a deep timber portico, fitted
with a broad leaded art-glass lantern, both marks and shelters the
entry. The north side of the L-shaped plan is mainly comprised of the
service areas of the house in the rear, with the dining room and guest
bedroom facing Piedmont Avenue on the front.  This wing was developed
as a full, three-story gabled elevation, complete with service
entrance (with separate address) on Bancroft Way.  On the west end of
the wing, the guest bedroom opens to a spacious balcony over the
projecting bay of the dining room below. At the top the eave is deep,
but the descending verge boards rake back at an angle to further open
the balcony space to the sky.

In late 1909, when the framing and sheathing of the house were
completed and the interior was ready to be finished,
Mrs. J. W. Beswick-Purchas wrote a letter to William and Caroline
Thorsen, her brother and sister-in-law, to offer her impressions of
the Greenes' work. She had recently paid a visit to Robert and Nellie
Blacker at their new residence in Pasadena, and, in an apparent
attempt to influence at least the interiors of the Berkeley house
still in construction, she penned this no-nonsense critique:

"You will want to know what I think of this house, as that is the
question uppermost in your minds at present. Well -- I find the
outside of the house and the grounds very pretty and attractive -- but
my impressions after moving through the various rooms was that this
architect has let his fancy run riot in wood! There is so much wood
about the outside that when one finds oneself encased in wooden rooms,
wooden wall, wood ceilings, wood floors, wood fixtures for light --
well, one has a little bit the feeling of a spider scrambling from one
cigar box to another.

The hall is excellent -- as that is a public room and can take the
wood surroundings but my own feeling would run to more warmth of color
and softer things. However, these are all individual tastes.  Only I
hope you won't have quite so much wood or people may say: Lumberman!
hm! nothing like using up your own goods! I find the porches -- the
porte-cochere, etc. -- most attractive. It is the bedrooms that suffer
and seem a little cold in this handling. Two heavy beams transect the
large guest room and broad bands surround this frieze.  This idea,
taken from the old English taverns, does not seem suitable to a
bedroom. I am thinking of the architect, mind you; this is no personal
criticism. All Mr. Green's [sic] woodwork is a delight for the
softness of its finish.  It is like fresh butter or paste squeezed out
of a tube -- so soft are the surfaces and the corners. As for the
furniture, I find it very excellent for one or two rooms -- such as
the hall or dining room especially -- but in my opinion it is too
light in structure and too hard for living rooms.  It is all in
keeping with the style of architecture and the wall fittings but there
is not a deep, soft chair or sofa in the house. It is all as the style
of office furniture though it is built on fine old English plain lines
and beautiful work. But you see what I mean, don't you? It is studio
furniture.

I am glad you are furnishing most of the rooms yourself and you will
be glad for every bit of color in your rugs if Mr. Green gives you as
much wood with a dull finish and sad color as he has here.

Nellie's rugs are very fine and very pretty. But too light and dainty
in coloring for the somber wood colorings. One more point. Don't let
Green light your rooms with lanterns of stained glass. They are very
artistic in shape and coloring perceived in the daylight but as points
of illumination they are rather negative and one finds oneself in a
'dim religious light' everywhere in the house.

This is a damper to a natural buoyant flow of spirits -- a hindrance
to work of any sort, and very expensive -- as one has to turn on all
the lights in a big room not to feel that one is in moonlight.

One more thing. Do have a plain electric light near the beds in your
bedrooms and a table beside the bed where this light can stand to be
switched on at will. It is rather a nuisance to get out of bed and
walk across the room to see what time it is in these dark, early
mornings.

I am afraid I will leave you with the impression that I like few
things in Nellie's house but I have pointed out rather the faults
which struck me unfavorably, that you might get another point of view
when you are considering all these questions.

The dim lights may be grateful to two people with affected eyesight
but I am sure they would spoil the ordinary healthy sight in trying to
work in indifferent, insufficient light.... Green is leaving today for
Berkeley."44

While she left little doubt as to her feelings, it is difficult to say
what impact, if any, the criticisms had on the Greenes' and the
Thorsens' plans. The program for the public rooms, at least, emulates
the Blacker house model in many respects. In both houses, the entry
and stair-hall are paneled in teak, and the living and dining rooms
are finished in mahogany. Even the dramatic grain of the eight-ply
paneling is similar in both houses. As at the Blacker house (and
against which Mrs. Beswick-Purchas had warned) mahogany and
stained-glass lanterns hang by leather straps from the Thorsens'
ceiling in the entry hall, stairway, and upstairs hall. Leaded art
glass for the house was executed by Emil Lange, who followed Charles
Greene's design for a stout, gnarled grapevine that stretches its
limbs from the side lights of the entry into the front door and
transom panels.

The living room is a long, light-filled space, with a broad window on
the west, flanked by casements, and on the south, more windows angled
out in a dramatic bay. In January 1910, possibly as a result of the
Beswick-Purchas letter, the Greenes designed six recessed ceiling
lights as substitutes for the solitary "eye-comfort" fixture that was
originally designed to hang in the center of the room. The built-in
features of this room rival any among the Greenes' work. Built-in
bookcases with glazed cabinet doors dominate the wall space, and a
built-in fall-front desk is fitted into the east wall. Mauve Grueby
tiles face the fireplace and hearth, and the polished-steel lintel,
shaped in the "lift" design, is inlaid with a vine-like pattern in
copper and brass. In 1914, Charles Greene designed a steel fire
screen, whose image of birds, a serpent, and a bat amid flames,
previews the symbolist direction his decorative arts designs would
soon take. Gloomy, ebonized wall sconces with leaded art-glass panels
shed dim light above the fireplace. Above these, paintings of delicate
rose vines form a band of light above the mahogany trim, broken only
by planter-shaped brackets from which the vines seem to grow. The
exquisite trim detail and overall quality of construction is a tribute
to William Issac Ott, who was sent north from Pasadena by Peter Hall
to supervise the project. Indeed, the local firm of Hall and Ott was
temporarily established for the sole purpose of building the Thorsen
house.

Off the entry hall is a small den, originally used to display
Mr. Thorsen's yachting trophies. Paneled in simple canvas stretched
between teak-trim frames, its masculine aspect is reminiscent of
Mr. Gamble's den. The dining room is approached from the side, the
full view of it a surprise until the moment of entry through double,
piano-hinge french doors. Daylight floods in from the west bay of
windows, and at night, a fire in the fireplace, and two overhead
leaded art-glass boxes, would cast a golden glow on the Greene and
Greene furniture. The dining suite was the only furniture originally
designed for the house, though several pieces were commissioned later
for other areas. The Thorsens purchased American antiques and Persian
rugs for the other rooms in the house, but gave the Greenes
responsibility even for the rug in the dining room. All of the dining
pieces -- sideboard, server, table, and chairs -- were conceptualized
by Charles Greene on one sheet of paper. In this way, each piece could
be carefully proportioned to the others, and it is arguably the most
refined and successful furniture of the Greenes' careers. With the
dining table fully extended to seat fourteen, the furniture comes into
ideal scale with the room. Decorative inlay, depicting a delicate
periwinkle design, is carried out in each piece (except the server) in
abalone, oak, and fruitwoods. The chair backs employ a modified "lift"
design in the splats, with tiny brass pins fastening ebony connectors
to the mahogany uprights. Here also the frieze was painted with
branches and blossoms on a trellis structure, bringing a hint of
nature indoors.

Port Orford cedar was used for built-in drawers and cabinets and for
trim material in the upstairs halls and chambers. These included
separate suites for Mr. and Mrs. Thorsen, a bedroom in the north wing
for their two sons, a guest bedroom, a sewing room, and servants'
quarters on the third level. In the basement, a space referred to as
the "Jolly Room" was dedicated to stage performances and leisure
activities for the boys. In all aspects, the Thorsen house was
designed and built to the highest standards, and represents the
Greenes at the height of their powers working together as a team. It
would not last. With this commission, the door closed on the era of
the "ultimate bungalows" and the coming years would never generate the
same level of progressive design within the Arts and Crafts idiom.