Though born near Cincinnati and city-reared, Charles Sumner Greene (1868-1957), at left in photo, and Henry Mather Greene (1870-1954) spent long stretches of their boyhood on their mother’s West Virginia family farm. Art historians trace the love of nature and reverence for simplicity so manifest in the brothers’ work to early experiences planting and harvesting, blacksmithing and doing wood carving.

When the Greene brothers were old enough for high school, the family moved to St. Louis. There, Charles and Henry attended the new Manual Training School of Washington University, receiving a formal education in carpentry and metalworking as well as the normal academic subjects. They went on to study architecture at MIT and to apprentice in Boston’s leading firms, mastering the popular styles of the day.

In 1893, the brothers left the East to join their parents in California. They hung their shingle in Pasadena – then a town of 10,000 people and a popular winter destination for moneyed Midwesterners.

Charles, the older and more artistic brother, served as principal designer. The more pragmatic Henry managed the business. At first, “they almost had no work,” says Ted Bosley, director of the Gamble House and a noted Greene and Greene scholar. “Things began to fall in place, not coincidentally, in 1902 and 1903,” Bosley adds. “That’s when they hit their stride and really started to have their own voice. Previously, they had been recapitulating a lot of the historical styles, what other architects were doing in Pasadena.”

Gradually the Greenes built an architectural vocabulary all their own – drawing on Japanese and Chinese structures, the writings of William Morris and an appreciation for Southern California’s blissfully mild climate.

“We have got to have bricks and stone and wood and plaster; common, homely, cheap materials, every one of them,” wrote Charles Greene in 1907. “Leave them as they are – stone for stone, brick for brick, wood for wood, plaster for plaster. Why disguise them? Thought and care are all that we need, for skill we have. The noblest work of art is to make these common things beautiful.”

As the Greene brothers’ reputation grew, their commissions went beyond architectural plans to elaborate designs for furniture, carpets, lighting, glass art and landscaping. They gathered around them a network of superb craftsmen, most notably glass artists Emil Lange and Harry Sturdy, and master carpenters John and Peter Hall. At the height of their careers, between 1907 and 1914, the Greenes demanded and usually obtained total control over their projects.

The 1907 Blacker house displayed the Greenes in full command of their individual design vocabulary – jutting porte cocheres, second-story porches with Japanese railings, gables and bands of casement windows, terraces and exposed timbers. Their signature ebony pegs and cloud lift motifs [seen in the table at left] were ubiquitous to the period. But it didn’t last very long.

In 1916, Charles went into semi-retirement, moving his family to remote Carmel, Calif., the better “to ponder life and art.” Though he still collaborated with his brother from a distance, Charles increasingly devoted himself to aesthetic and spiritual pursuits. Henry continued to practice alone in Pasadena through the mid-1930s.

Today, Greene and Greene architecture is considered the epitome of California Arts and Crafts. And that style is more popular today than ever before – certainly more than in its actual heyday.

As the Greenes faded from view, their style fell out of favor, regarded as “completely anachronistic and irrelevant,” says Bosley. But in the ’40s, an unlikely group of up-and-coming young modernists began to pay attention to California’s design heritage, “looking for clues to move the architectural debate forward,” he adds. “And they found it, to large degree, in Greene and Greene.”

– Diane Krieger