Conversant in Craftsman

At the heyday of the Arts and Crafts movement, Los Angeles was building so vigorously that it still contains one of the world’s largest uninterrupted swaths of what came to be known as Craftsman houses. Yet those expecting the Los Angeles County Museum of Art show “The Arts and Crafts Movement in Europe and America, 1880--1920” to mirror back the city’s leaded windows, shingled roofs, sleeping porches and wrought iron porch lamps are in for a shock.

If the exhibition teaches us anything, it is that Arts and Crafts isn’t any one style. Rather, it is an idea, and as it was adopted by a fretful Western world stepping into the 20th century its face changed as unpredictably as an opiated dream.

Gallery after gallery is filled with fantastical objects -- neo-Gothic stained glass from England, posters done in a now ominous triumphal classicism from Germany, Magyar national dress from Hungary, a salt cellar in the shape of a Viking ship from Sweden. As visitors stagger into the final room, the American collection, the Yankee plainness comes as a relief.

Yet the California Arts and Crafts story isn’t here. Leave the museum, venture south of the 10 Freeway, look at the doorways shaped like Japanese gates next to the house with Tudor cross-timbering. Suddenly even our most tumbledown districts are revealed as part of a worldwide conversation among artists and architects. It becomes evident how the movement’s ideas played out here and how successfully.

Arts and Crafts ideals served as a blueprint for L.A., but in Europe they began more as a protest than a plan. Its founders, critic John Ruskin and designer William Morris, were riding a 19th century tide of isms: socialism, vegetarianism, pastoralism. Their antidote to the evils of the Industrial Revolution? A return to medieval principles of building, and the hand-hewn honesty of Tudor furniture. “The word crank hovers over them,” remarks British historian Alan Crawford.

Crawford is biographer of the movement’s ambassador to America, Charles Robert Ashbee, or “CRA.” Ashbee and comrades on both sides of the Atlantic created hardware, insisted on highest principles of woodwork and argued endlessly about finishes. Wives came in as weavers and potters. Magazines were launched in dreamy new typefaces, all the better to call for beautiful revolution.

By 1910, Arts and Crafts colonies were failing just as nobly in the U.S. as in England: Rose Valley in Pennsylvania and Byrdcliffe in New York, Ashbee’s Cotswold commune in the English West Country. Wallpaper was no match for the satanic mills of Manchester, the Boer War and two World Wars after that.

Paradoxically, its socialist agenda made it to the masses only in capitalist America. In Los Angeles, it was a case of architectural trickledown that actually trickled. When Ashbee saw the mahogany mansions being built in Pasadena by the architect brothers Charles and Henry Greene, he considered the result truer than the Midwestern “prairie” style of homes by Frank Lloyd Wright. “Perhaps it is California that speaks rather than Illinois,” Ashbee wrote.

At the time, California was speaking to a number of Arts and Crafts architects, including Julia Morgan, Ernest Coxhead, Irving Gill, Louis Easton, Arthur and Alfred Heineman, Bernard Maybeck and John Thomas. Local developers also got the bug. Sleeping porches made sense here in a way they didn’t back East. California wasn’t passing through New York, but going straight to Europe for ideas. Pasadena tile maker Ernest Batchelder traveled to England to visit Ashbee’s commune shortly before it folded.

California bound

New York was, however, coming to California. It took Gustav Stickley, a working class American boy born so poor he was put to work at age 12, to cut through the posh English twitter about socialist utopias and Americanize the movement. Born in 1858 in Wisconsin, Stickley left school in the eighth grade, worked as a stonemason and in furniture factories, and after a move to New York became director at a workshop at New York State Prison at Auburn (where he is rumored to have made the electric chair).

Ironically, what may be the best-known symbol of this state’s Arts and Crafts movement, “mission” furniture, may or may not have its roots in California at all. It all depends on the dubious origins of a mystery prototype sent, supposedly from California, to New York furniture maker Joseph McHugh. “Mission” was a style tag applied to his knockoffs, then later transferred to the plain, oaken pieces developed by Stickley.

By 1901, Stickley had turned “mission” furniture into an American living room standard and launched the Craftsman magazine. This hosted the Craftsman Home Builders Club, through which he disseminated tens of thousands of blueprints for homes free to subscribers.

In 1904, Stickley visited Los Angeles, where the “bungalow,” a British colonial style of warm-weather housing from Bengal, was being adapted; he and others began developing a distinct subset of Craftsman homes now known as the “California bungalow.” Look at these homes and there’s no doubt that Europe had reached the Pacific. Summing up bungalow style, architectural historians Robert Winter and Alexander Vertikoff describe it as “an amalgam of Japanese and Swiss motifs -- with a little Tudor thrown in.”

The proletariat for whom the bungalows were intended weren’t bothered by the mixed motifs. As L.A. boomed -- its population grew sixfold between 1900 and 1920, says Ken Bernstein of the Los Angeles Conservancy -- Craftsman architecture low and high, clean and confused, flourished with it.

At the high end, Greene & Greene built as many as 160 houses, many of them in Pasadena. Mansions lined Adams Boulevard, and more modest suburbs spread along the Arroyo and west through midcity and to Santa Monica. In fact, where there was building, there was Craftsman: the college and farm communities of Covina, Claremont, Ontario, Riverside, Old Towne Orange. Up north, Craftsman replaced Victorian stock lost in the San Francisco earthquake and became a signature style of Berkeley, Portland and Seattle.

Out of favor

What wasn’t disseminated during the rush were instructions on how to care for the houses. Wood warps in the sun. Termites eat it. There is wet rot, dry rot, fire. The Depression and World War II made the cost to maintain it nearly impossible.

After Craftsman California fell into disrepair, by the 1950s, says Jessica Smith, curator of American art at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, the enemy of the prosperous postwar period was style. One way to turn a Greene & Greene into a trendy new ranch house was to lop off the second floor and paint what was left. USC-trained preservationist Randell Makinson estimates that half of the Greene & Greene buildings survived the style’s fall from grace. During those same years, great tracts of old Craftsman Los Angeles were descending to slum status.

In 1954, Arts & Crafts architecture was so out of fashion that when a visiting professor at USC asked Makinson, then a third-year architecture student, for slides of Greene brothers homes, the university had only one. Makinson hotfooted it out to Pasadena to photograph Gamble House. A preservation movement was born in a moment.

“I wound up standing in front of the Gamble place, my tripod up, looking at the house,” Makinson recalls. “The door opened and Mr. Cecil Gamble, a very tall man in a black suit, came strolling out, and asked me what I was doing. As architecture students are accustomed to being able to see things, I told him what I was doing. And he said, ‘Westmoreland is a private street.’ So I apologized and said, ‘I should have knocked on your door.’ Then he smiled, and in the next 3 1/2 hours I saw his garden, his azaleas, gardenias and his birds. He showed me the entire house, basement to third floor, and we ended up sitting on the carpet looking at the blueprint.”

So began the friendship between Makinson and the Gamble family that would in 1966 result in the house being opened to the public, Makinson developing a docent-training program and Gamble House receiving so many donations of Greene & Greene furniture that these offerings became a collection at the neighboring Huntington.

Canny museumship sparked citywide restoration. “At the time,” says Makinson, “banks wouldn’t give loans to help restore an old house.” The only ways to address rot had been to demolish a house, or seal up the wood with spackle, paint, stucco or aluminum siding. “People who left the Gamble House would say, ‘You know, Myrtle, we could go home and strip the white paint off the living room wood.’ ”

Often they were stripping the woodwork of bungalows built with only paint-grade wood. But to the mind of Nicole Possert of the Highland Park Heritage Trust, even the most modest homes have important stories to tell. “I got my 1905 Craftsman in 1989. Because of the work in discovering what it was that I owned, I became an active member of the community.” She is now a citizen curator, keen to send visitors to El Alisal, the house built by hand from Arroyo Seco river rock by Charles Lummis, or to talk about the southwest movement, the Judson Studios and expansion suburbs along the Red Car trolley lines.

Moving to preserve

In 1982, Highland Park residents formed the first of the city’s Craftsman-era “historic preservation overlay zones” or HPOZs, which protected more than 2,000 buildings, from Sears, Roebuck kit houses right up to El Alisal. Preservation fever spread. Residents of West Adams, an 8-square-mile district bordered by Crenshaw Boulevard and Figueroa Street and Jefferson and Pico boulevards, refashioned the area “Historic West Adams.”

Dinky signs bearing names such as “Kinney Heights,” “Arlington Heights” and “Harvard Heights” appeared on light posts indicating newly minted HPOZs. Go to the house tours, garden tours, ice-cream socials and you’ll find homeowners, like Possert, fluent in an elaborate language of Craftsman substyles: Victorian-Shingle-Craftsman-Period Revival-Mission-Tudor-Prairie-South Seas.

Restoration up and down the West Coast brought back to market period-style fixtures and fittings, even typefaces. When in 1971 Alice Waters opened the restaurant Chez Panisse in a Craftsman house in Berkeley, the menus and cookbooks demanded the dripping Morris-inspired typefaces. Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft included Desdemona and Gill fonts in its word processing programs.

Northern California-based chain Restoration Hardware did so well selling “mission” furniture, it bought the company that makes it. The Oregon company Rejuvenation was doing such a brisk trade in “Craftsman,” “mission,” “transitional mission” and “Tudor” light fixtures, it hired Bo Sullivan, a University of North Carolina-trained architectural historian, to design them.

For Makinson, the term Arts and Crafts “sounds a little bit too much like basket-weaving.” Though the movement was born among Victorians yearning for what they imagined to be the yeoman simplicity of the Middle Ages, Makinson cringes at looking at Arts and Crafts in a purely historical way.

To him, it’s an ethos, to do with basic notions of art, and craft, ideas as relevant now as then, and clearly evident in the work of Wallace Neff, Richard Neutra, R.M. Schindler, even Frank Gehry. Times have changed, Makinson says. So have materials and the way we live. To his mind, there has been only one constant for the architects who come here: “California is still the place of opportunity.”

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On the right path

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With a Thomas Guide and a short list of neighborhoods -- Harvard Heights, Bungalow Heaven, Old Towne Orange -- anyone with a car might follow the thread the Arts and Crafts movement wove through Southern California. But for a more organized approach, there are many professional and volunteer groups that take pride in showing off their period pieces.

The current exhibition at LACMA adds some special events for Arts and Crafts lovers as well, including classes, seminars, films and guided tours.

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Exhibits

L.A. County Museum of Art

“The Arts and Crafts Movement in Europe and America, 1880-1920: Design for the Modern World,” an exhibition of 300 furnishings, textiles, books and decorative items from 13 countries, continues through April 3. General admission, $9; seniors and students, $5; under 17, free. 5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 857-6000, www.lacma.org. Also, see Events below.

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The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens

The Virginia Steele Scott Gallery of American Art contains work by noted Arts and Crafts designers Charles and Henry Greene, including a re-created dining room and stairwell from two Pasadena homes, and handcrafted furnishings. General admission, $15; seniors, $12; students, $10; ages 5 to 11, $6; under 5, free. 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, (626) 405-2100, www.huntington.org. Also, see Events below.

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The Gamble House

The recently restored 1908 Pasadena house, designed by Charles and Henry Greene, is a National Historic Landmark and preeminent example of American Arts and Crafts-style architecture. One-hour public tours are available 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Thursday through Sunday. General admission, $8; students and seniors, $5. “Behind the Velvet Ropes” tour, 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. on the second Wednesday of each month. $40 per person. 4 Westmoreland Place, Pasadena, (626) 793-3334, www.gamblehouse.org.

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Marston House

This 1905 home, on the National Register of Historic Places, is an early work by San Diego architects William Hebbard and Irving Gill. It’s furnished in the style of the American Arts and Crafts movement. Docent-led tours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Friday through Sunday. General admission, $5; seniors, military and students, $4; under 6, free. Balboa Park, 3525 7th Ave., San Diego, (619) 298-3142.

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Lummis Home (El Alisal)

Built by hand between 1898 and 1910 by Charles F. Lummis, El Alisal -- “place of the Sycamore” -- is now a museum run by the Historical Society of Southern California. Docents lead guided tours of the nine rooms constructed of river stone and hand-hewn timbers, and the drought-resistant garden. Free tours noon to 4 p.m. Friday through Sunday. Donations accepted. 200 E. Avenue 43, Highland Park, (323) 222-0546, www.socalhistory.org.

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Tours

West Adams

The West Adams Heritage Assn. organizes several walking tours of specific neighborhoods, such as Jefferson Park, Harvard Heights, Adams-Normandie or Angelus Vista. The next one will be June 4 at a location to be announced. Other annual events include a July 4 picnic at a historic property, and a holiday progressive dinner and tour Dec. 3-4. The group also has self-guided “coffee walks” planned for the fall. (323) 735-9242, www.westadamsheritage.com.

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L.A. Conservancy

In addition to its weekly walking tours of downtown, the L.A. Conservancy leads quarterly tours of Highland Park, which includes the Craftsman homes of Sycamore Terrace. Tours are at 1 p.m. Feb. 26, May 28, Aug. 27 and Nov. 19. $10. Reservations required. (213) 623-2489, www.laconservancy.org.

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Pasadena self-guided tours

The Pasadena Convention and Visitors Bureau has designed 10 self-guided driving or walking tours of its architecturally significant neighborhoods, including the Craftsman bohemian area of the lower Arroyo Seco, the area surrounding the Gamble House, Historic Highlands and Bungalow Heaven. www.pasadenacal.com/architecturaltours.htm

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National Preservation Month Tours

Pasadena Heritage leads four bus tours May 14, including two with Arts and Crafts subjects. The Pasadena Architectural Legacy tour, 9 to 11 a.m., surveys all the building styles. From 1 to 3 p.m., there will be a tour of the homes designed by brothers Alfred and Arthur Heineman between 1907 and 1923. Tickets go on sale April 11. One tour, $30; both $55. (626) 441-6333 or

www.pasadenaheritage.org.

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Architecture Tours L.A.

The privately run company typically has two 2 1/2 -hour tours daily at 9:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. The Hancock Park-Miracle Mile tour contains a number of Craftsman homes, and the Pasadena tour of 90 sites includes houses by architects Charles and Henry Greene, Alfred and Arthur Heineman, and Tim Walsh. $65. Reservations required. (323) 464-7868 or

www.architecturetoursla.com.

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Events

Symposium

Scholars discuss aspects of the Arts and Crafts movement, moderated by LACMA’s exhibition curator Wendy Kaplan. Session topics include the role of Arts and Crafts in the Western U.S., Ireland, England, Hungary, Germany and Russia. 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Saturday. Tickets (includes reception and museum admission), $20; seniors or museum members, $15; students, $10. LACMA’s Leo S. Bing Theater, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 857-6010, lacma.org.

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Art Class Series

The Huntington, LACMA and the Gamble House are cosponsoring a six-week class, “The Arts and Crafts Movement From Europe to Pasadena,” from 9 to 11 a.m. Saturdays, Feb. 26 to April 9. The six sessions offer an in-depth look at the Arts and Crafts movement, including guided tours of the LACMA show and Gamble House, lectures on William Morris, the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony, Charles and Henry Greene and a walking tour. Single sessions, $45; full series, $250. Registration through LACMA: (323) 857-6010.

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Lecture

Mary Greenstad of England’s Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum discusses the Arts and Crafts movement in rural England. 2 p.m. Feb. 12 in LACMA’s Leo S. Bing Theater. Included in LACMA admission.

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Lecture

Emily Zaiden of LACMA’s decorative arts department discusses how L.A. was shaped by the Arts and Crafts movement. 2 p.m., March 20 in LACMA’s Dorothy Collins Brown Auditorium. Included in LACMA admission.

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Film

“Greene and Greene: The Art of Architecture” is an hourlong film about the lives and careers of Charles and Henry Greene, who created the Gamble and Blacker houses in Pasadena. 2 p.m. March 12 in LACMA’s Leo S. Bing Theater. Included in LACMA admission.

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Craftsman Weekend

Pasadena Heritage holds a popular weekend of events, including bus and walking tours, exhibits of contemporary and antique furnishings and accessories, lectures and special evening events at historic sites. Oct. 21 to 23. Prices vary. (626) 441-6333 or www.pasadena

heritage.org.

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-- Robin Rauzi