Imagine if Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan, having commissioned Leonardo da Vinci to execute a 29-foot mural for the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie (the church and monastery his father built), had anticipated the need to actively preserve this treasure for posterity – and had possessed the means of keeping it in peak condition (impossible, of course, but let’s go with it for the sake of argument).

What then?

Why, Leonardo’s Last Supper would not now be the pale ghost of a masterpiece fading irrevocably from view with each passing year.

Now imagine if Cecil Gamble, an heir to the Procter and Gamble fortune, had brought this sensibility to the Pasadena winter home his parents, Mary and David Gamble, had built in 1908 to the precise specifications of master architects and designers Charles Sumner Greene and Henry Mather Greene?

Actually, no imagination is necessary, because that’s exactly what Cecil Gamble and all the Gambles that followed did. Passed from generation to generation, the Gamble House has miraculously stayed intact – nary a stick of gorgeous inlaid furniture sold off at Christie’s, not one rare wood panel painted over to brighten things up, not a single delicate art-glass window replaced with sensible double-pane. And the result? An 8,200-square-foot piece of California bungalow perfection, immaculately preserved inside and out with the care usually afforded a priceless museum treasure.

After all, that’s what the Gamble House is: a priceless artwork in teak, maple, oak, cedar, mahogany and glass. Much too large to fit in a UV-blocking glass case, but a treasure nonetheless. And, thankfully, 500 years from now, that’s what the Gamble House will continue to be.

The house was given to the City of Pasadena in 1966, and USC’s School of Architecture was charged with preserving the house and running all its programs. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1978, and last year, the Gamble House celebrated its centennial. To mark the occasion, its doting caretakers arranged a jubilee that would have made the Sforzas blush.

Together with The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens – home to the USC-owned Greene and Greene Archives as well as a Greene and Greene collection on permanent display in its American art wing – the university has put together the most comprehensive exhibition ever undertaken on the work of the architecture and design legends.

Co-curated by Gamble House director Ted Bosley and Gamble House curator Anne Mallek, “A ‘New and Native’ Beauty: The Art and Craft of Greene & Greene” assembles 140 furnishings from 25 major Greene and Greene commissions. Scattered across collections based as close as Pasadena and as far away as Paris, many of these objects have never before been seen by the public. Important pieces like the 1909 Blacker House mahogany dining table and the 1918 Whitworth leaded-glass window hobnob with lesser-known gems like the door escutcheons from the 1905 Adelaide Tichenor House and a 1927 canvas boudoir screen from the 1911 Culbertson House.

With support from the Gambles and several foundations, the show opened last October in the Huntington’s MaryLou and George Boone Gallery, accompanied by lectures, film screenings and events ranging from an Arts and Crafts marketplace, to hands-on printing and tile-making workshops, to a global scholarly conference.

Smaller complementary installations spun off the centennial celebration.

At the Pasadena Museum of California Art (www.pmcaonline.org), “Seeing Greene & Greene: Architecture in Photographs” interpreted the brothers’ homes and landscapes through the lens of leading 20th-century photographers.

At the Pasadena Museum of History (www.pasadenahistory.org), “Living Beautifully: Greene and Greene in Pasadena” displayed the architects’ drafting instruments, wood carving tools and shop drawings as well as personal documents and family photographs. “The Art and Craft of Textile Design 1860-1920,” also at the PMH, surveyed fabric designs that characterized the aesthetic movement.

Most of these programs ended in January, but Greene and Greene enthusiasts around the country can still see the main attraction. “A ‘New and Native’ Beauty” is currently en route to its next stop on a national tour. Bosley and Mallek will oversee the exhibition’s installation in the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum (next door to the White House), where it will be on view March 13 through June 7.

The last stop will be Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, an appropriate spot since Boston was the cradle of the Greenes’ artistry: The brothers received their architectural training at MIT in the late 1890s. “A ‘New and Native’ Beauty” will be on view at the Museum of Fine Arts from July 14 through October 18 – a year to the day after it opened at the Huntington.

Unlike the Sforzas of Milan, the Gambles knew what a treasure they had the moment they laid eyes on it in 1908. The Cincinnati-based industrialist and his wife had ordered their winter bungalow built in absentia, leaving the young architects Charles and Henry Greene total creative freedom and a then-astronomical budget of $79,000. At the time, Pasadena was a small but sophisticated resort town blessed with the climate to attract a steady stream of tourists from the Midwest and the East.

Mary and David Gamble wintered in their Greene and Greene house every year thereafter, and Mary’s maiden sister, Julia Huggins, took up permanent residence there. After Aunt Julia passed away in 1943, Cecil and Louise Gamble briefly toyed with the idea of selling. But they abruptly took the house off the market when a prospective buyer talked of whitewashing the interior paneling of rare Burma teak and Honduras mahogany. Sacrilege.

If only the Greenes had had more such clients. Before preservation laws banned this abuse, Greene and Greene homes could be gutted at an owner’s whim. Some – like the once-glorious Blacker House – were stripped of their furnishings by unscrupulous buyers looking to turn an easy profit.

In contrast, “we have almost all of the original furnishings,” says curator Mallek, with understandable pride. “We’re only missing two dining chairs – and they’re still in the family.” A couple of exterior lamps, stolen off the house some years ago, are the only reproductions in sight. Make that one exterior lamp: The other was recently replaced with the original, donated by a good Samaritan who found it on eBay.

Today, of all the Greene and Greene commissions, the Gamble House alone remains with its original furnishings exactly where its makers intended them to be. Of the 150 structures built by the brilliant Greene brothers, 66 have been demolished and 14 others have been altered beyond recall. The remaining 60 structures are all that’s left of their body of work. A sad testament to our disposable culture.

“A ‘New and Native’ Beauty” takes its title from a much-belated citation bestowed on the Greene brothers by the American Institute of Architects in 1952. Though the Gambles appreciated the work of art that was their winter home, the architectural profession wasn’t so clear-sighted. Ignored for decades, the Greenes finally received recognition in the 1940s.

Their champion: architectural writer Jean Murray Bangs, a frequent contributor to House Beautiful and wife of modernist architect Harwell Hamilton Harris. Having lived in Pasadena most of her life, Bangs literally discovered the Greenes right under her nose. Intrigued, she sought out the long-retired Henry Greene, then in his 70s. She rescued the firm’s drawings from a rat-infested cabinet in an abandoned garage and set about researching a book. The book never materialized, but Bangs published several articles on the Greenes in major trade journals. Reintroduced to the profession, the Greenes were awarded a special citation by the national AIA recognizing Charles and Henry, then aged 83 and 82 respectively, as “the formulators of a new and native architecture.”

However, the neglect continued as the Greenes’ aesthetic – adapted from the creed of 19th-century English aesthetician William Morris: “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful” – yielded to the inevitability of cheap, mass-produced furnishings. That is, until one morning in 1954, when Cecil Gamble noticed a young man on the street taking photographs of his house. He went out to investigate, and invited Randell Makinson ’56 inside for a closer look. The USC architecture student would go on to become a family friend as well as a pioneer in preservation architecture, devoting his life to Greene scholarship and writing four books on the nearly forgotten designers. He also became first curator, then founding director of the Gamble House, having spearheaded the 1966 transfer of the historic property into USC’s care (see USC Trojan Family Magazine, Autumn 1998). When Makinson retired as director of the house museum in 1992, then-associate director Ted Bosley was appointed to take the helm of what remains the only Greene and Greene home open to the public.

Ted Bosley’s long relationship with the Gamble House started in, of all unlikely places, a fraternity house. While apartment-hunting during his freshman year at UC Berkeley, he came across “this beautiful house,” he recalls. “I knocked on the door and asked, ‘Can I live here?’”

So he rushed Sigma Phi. The beautiful house, built by the Greenes, it turned out, was now a fraternity (it’s better known to Arts and Crafts enthusiasts as the 1909 Thorsen House). “I joined the fraternity, lived there for four years and fell in love with Greene and Greene,” Bosley says.

To a listener’s disbelieving stare, he affirms: “I’m not kidding. It’s a Greene and Greene frat house.” He adds, a touch defensively, “A lot of lives, my own included, have been shaped by that experience.”

If scenes from Animal House are still running through your head, hit the pause button now. A natural magnet for art history majors like Bosley, the house has long attracted its own self-appointed guardians, and the fraternity imposes strict rules on its residents – from restrictions against driving new nails into walls to mandatory maintenance chores to be performed weekly.

The Thorsens’ descendants had removed the original Greene and Greene furniture, but the house itself was in fine shape. “I’ll tell you what,” says Bosley, “the reality is that benign neglect is one of the greatest friends of historic preservation.” The Sigma Phi brothers, who have owned the house since 1942, “had neither the money nor the desire to make significant alterations to the house.”

Bosley organized a traveling exhibition to prove his point a dozen years ago. It just so happens that USC had received much of the original Thorsen House furnishings in a bequest. So in the summer of 1996, when Bosley was already director of the Gamble House: “I kicked all my Sigma Phi brothers out, and we trucked it up north and refurnished the house. And for nine weeks we had about 11,000 people come through to see how a fraternity could be turned into a house museum overnight.”

Like that earlier exhibition, “A ‘New and Native’ Beauty” was the brainchild of Bosley, who by now has been director of the Gamble House for 16 years. An antiques dealer first planted the seeds for this new exhibition with a casual mention of knowing where to find miscellaneous Greene and Greene furniture.

That was seven years ago. With the Gamble House centennial approaching, Bosley decided the time was right.

Money was another matter.

USC’s School of Architecture operates the Gamble House on less than $1 million a year, including the salaries of a director, a curator and an archivist. “Nobody’s getting rich at the Gamble House,” Bosley cracks. “We work here because we love it,” he adds earnestly. “And we have a tremendously dedicated core of volunteers. Everybody’s here for the right reason.”

A core group of 150 active docents keeps the house running smoothly. These unpaid volunteers give regular house tours four afternoons a week as well as special white-gloved “behind-the-velvet-rope” tours every month. (During the centennial exhibition’s three-month run in Pasadena, Gamble House docents did double duty at the Huntington as well.) They also arrange fresh flowers throughout the house. And they help operate the bookstore, which, incidentally, is among the finest of its kind, with an exhaustive selection of Arts and Crafts literature. Located in the carriage house, it retains such curiosities as the vintage fuel pump that filled the Gamble family’s automobiles.

Fortunately, the Gamble heirs are still very much involved with the house – descendants Joseph Messier and Margaret Winslow and a representative of the family’s Ayrshire Foundation serve on the Gamble House board and help round up the funds that allow Bosley to occasionally think big.

So instead of a standard exhibition catalogue for the centennial exhibition, Bosley set his sights on taking Greene and Greene scholarship to the next level. A noted expert in his own right, he is the author of two essential books on the Pasadena architects: The Gamble House (1992) and Greene & Greene (2000). These and other books by Greene scholars have covered the basic facts, he says, but for the centennial, he wanted to open new horizons.

Bosley and co-editor Anne Mallek tapped experts in related fields – the history of leaded glass, metal work and landscape design – to focus on the Greenes. The result: “Each of the essays breaks new ground,” says Bosley of the handsome, 272-page edition that shares its title with the Huntington exhibition. Frank Lloyd Wright expert Julie Sloan took a crack at the Greenes’ stained-glass production. American historian Margaretta Lovell showed that, long before the concept of globalization emerged, the Greenes’ exacting designs relied on imported woods and other basic materials from overseas.

Gamble House archivist Ann Scheid, a noted Pasadena historian, probed the Greenes’ working relationship with their female clients – who tended to be widows, heiresses and pioneering women in the professions. Mallek, a William Morris expert trained at Oxford and the prestigious Courtauld Institute of Art in London, penned an article on the sympathetic interests of Morris and Charles Greene. Bosley’s own contribution, the final chapter in the book, makes the startling claim that the Greenes – still alive, though long forgotten by then – wielded unexpected influence over mid-century modernism.

Published by the London-based Merrell Ltd., A New and Native Beauty begins with a foreword by postmodern architect Frank Gehry ’54.

It wasn’t as though Bosley had nothing else to do with his time. In 2001, he had successfully reached a $3.8 million fundraising target to launch the long-overdue Gamble House exterior conservation. While the bungalow’s interior had been beautifully maintained, after 90 years of exposure to sun, wind and rain, the house was in serious need of conservation and restoration on the outside. Rot had devoured significant portions of the massive rafters, and a wet forecast meant a volunteer bucket brigade.

Heading up the project was an architect who, like Bosley, knows what it’s like to inhabit a Greene and Greene house. As an undergraduate, Kelly Sutherlin McLeod ’82, BArch ’83 had the privilege of spending two years as a scholar-in-residence at the Gamble House (see story below).

And, like Bosley, the experience changed the course of her life. By the time the two met in the early 1990s, McLeod had a flourishing architectural practice and several Greene and Greene projects on her résumé, including an ambitious effort – not yet realized – to relocate the Adelaide Tichenor House to Cal State Long Beach, and to recreate the lost Japanese garden designed by the Greenes. McLeod was the obvious choice to lead the Gamble House conservation effort that Bosley had set in motion.

But first, some definitions are in order. “Restoration” refers to bringing an object back to good-as-new condition. “Conservation” means carefully bringing it into stable condition without erasing signs of normal aging and wear and tear.

“Honoring the Greenes’ design intent and maintaining authenticity were key goals,” explains McLeod.

“The Gamble House project team was committed to a conservation effort,” she says. “The intent was not to restore the exterior back to a particular time – not to 1908, when it was built; not to the 1920s, when Mary and David last lived there; and not to 1963, when the last Gamble family member lived there. We were conserving the house as a 100-year-old work of art.”

Visitors can still see natural weathering patterns on the house. “You still see scratches along shakes, where people have dragged their hands as they walked up the steps,” says McLeod. After the conservation was completed, many people remarked that they couldn’t detect any difference. “This is a huge compliment to the project,” she says.

Although this was the first comprehensive conservation effort, fixes to the exterior had taken place over the years. Very little had been documented, however – not what was done, when it was done, who did it, why they did it, or how they did it. So this conservation team made a Herculean effort to document every aspect of the project – through video, photography and journals – knowing that in years to come, when further conservation is due to happen, a future conservation team, presumably with better techniques at its disposal, will know exactly what has been done previously.

Leaving such an explicit trail of breadcrumbs meant the team spent far more time planning the work than actually doing it. Seven years of preparation led to 11 months of actual conservation work. A historic structure report commissioned by Bosley itemized the condition of every square inch of the exterior, and how it had gotten that way.

The picture was rather dismal. The rafters were rotted through and the beam ends a breeding ground for fungus. A 1985 effort at stopping the rot with injections of an epoxy compound had only made matters worse: The inert material trapped moisture within the timber, promoting more rot.

The roofing membrane – last replaced in 1987 – was a goner. Chronic leaks endangered the dining room and the second-floor hall. McLeod herself produced detailed drawings to guide the correct installation of the replacement roofing, which would need to perform by today’s standards while honoring the appearance of the 1908 materials.

Deteriorated varnishes needed to be removed from windows, screens and porch railings. Discolored green lead-based paint – applied at Aunt Julia’s bidding in the 1940s – had to be addressed, along with the fragile redwood shakes.

Most of the house’s 150 window screens – custom-made to fit in one-of-a-kind wood frames – needed extensive repair.

Some frames had to be completely rebuilt, and new bronze wire mesh was installed throughout to match the original. Removing the frames was an ordeal in itself – each screw and hinge needing to be numbered, catalogued and squirreled away to ensure it could later be reunited with its frame. Each frame had to be swaddled and boxed to museum specifications for transportation to and from the conservation workshop.

By the time the conservation project wrapped up in 2004, Bosley was deep into the centennial planning process. He had recently brought in Mallek as Gamble House curator. He hired award-winning designer Brenda Levin as exhibition designer. And he recruited McLeod to design an interpretive reconstruction of a corner of the porch and pergola from the 1903 Arturo Bandini House in full scale. The only catch: The Bandini House had been bulldozed in the 1960s to make way for a parking lot. All that remained were a few drawings and faded photographs.

Why that house? The Bandini House marks a turning point in the evolution of the Greenes’ style, says McLeod, who spent a year and a half researching and designing the display. “They shed traditional styles – the Victorian and Aesthetic styles popular at the time – and looked towards the climate and lifestyle of Southern California,” she says. “Simple forms and materials appear in this early work. The Greenes were pursuing the development of a true California architecture.”

This was one of the first times the Greenes used a Japanese aesthetic structurally. Specifically, the wooden posts of the porch rest on natural stones – a feature Charles Greene probably saw in his copy of Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings. The elder Greene had obtained a copy of Edward Morse’s book in 1903. (The actual volume – with Charles’ signature and date – forms part of the Huntington exhibition; original Greene and Greene drawings for the Bandini House also are on display.)

“In the original pencil sketches, it remains visible where the bottoms of the posts were erased and stone footings added,” says McLeod. It wasn’t unusual for the Greenes to specify such minute detail. Indeed, in the education room of the exhibition, an enlarged diagram and a partial recreation of the Gamble House’s celebrated wood letter box reveal just how detailed the Greenes could get. The diagram indicates not just where the four different woods were to be inlaid, but also gives micro-elevations for each sliver.

“I have enjoyed observing the public’s reaction,” says McLeod of her reconstruction of the Bandini House porch, which is surprisingly rustic. It demonstrates that “the Greenes didn’t just wake up one day and design the Gamble House,” she says. “Their details and aesthetic evolved over time, and there is much to learn from their early work.”

As the centennial winds down, Bosley, Mallek and McLeod are looking ahead.

Landscaping is the next big project on Bosley’s to-do list. Japonesque stepping stones that dot the lawn and nearby pond are almost all that’s left of the Gamble House garden. A creeping fig that crawls up the foundation wall is its only remaining original plant. (An ornamental pruner visits regularly to tame that horticultural beast.)

Mallek looks forward to getting back to her job as curator of the Gamble House. “I feel like a parent who has neglected its child in the last year or so,” she says. “We have some conservation issues I need to tackle, and general collections management.”

And McLeod, regarded as the go-to architect for Greene and Greene projects, has two projects by the brothers on her plate – preserving the Pitcairn House, now part of a private school in Pasadena, and the Jennie Reeve House in Long Beach.

The latter poses an interesting restoration conundrum. “The house was built in 1904, and then Henry Greene worked with the owners in 1927 to relocate the house and designed some additions,” she says. “What is the period of significance? Is it 1904, when both brothers were on the project? Or 1927, when Henry designed alterations? And where do you target the restoration?”

The obvious answer: forward.

If you have questions or comments on this article, please send them to magazines@usc.edu.