She knew – with the certainty that comes from perfect knowledge – that this house could withstand whatever the Southland’s shaky plates dished out. After all, it was McLeod who had overseen the restoration of the Gamble House; and that restoration, completed in 2004, included a seismic retrofit.

Even without that assurance, she would have remained calm. The house, she knew, had been built to last: Its architects, the inventive Charles and Henry Greene, were mindful of the catastrophic temblor that had leveled San Francisco two years earlier, in 1906. Ingeniously, they had incorporated structural lessons from shipbuilding devised to help a vessel roll out rough weather.

“I feel fortunate to have been in the house during an earthquake,” McLeod said minutes later, standing on the front lawn with a group of relieved students while a custodian checked the house for nonexistent damage.

It was another milestone reached in McLeod’s lifelong relationship with the “ultimate bungalow.”

A quarter-century earlier, McLeod had lived in the Gamble House as a scholar-in-residence – the first woman to do so. She can still remember the fatherly questions the scholarship committee had asked during her interview: Would she be nervous living in such a large house? What if people peeked in the windows? How would she feel walking from her car to the empty house after dark? They were absurd questions. “I was always comfortable in the house, always – and I spent a lot of time here by myself.” The way McLeod remembers it, her male counterparts were the ones who tended to jump at every noise.

Since 1966, there has always been a pair of architecture seniors living here. The Gambles, in their gift of the house to USC and the City of Pasadena, stipulated that it should always be occupied, never reduced to a lifeless museum. Living rent-free in the servants’ quarters, Trojan architecture majors have served as caretakers ever since. Their chief duties: to keep an eye on the property and to set up and tear down amenities for special events.

Last summer, as part of the centennial celebration for the architectural masterpiece, then-residential scholars Brad Zuger ’08 and Anthony Laney ’08 got to set up for a truly special event – a reunion of scholars-in-residence across the decades. Ranging in ages from their 20s to their 60s, the alumni took a collective trip down memory lane.

“From the first student who wired the house for sound to more recent students who aren’t allowed beyond the velvet ropes,” McLeod says, they searched out their favorite nooks, and rediscovered the elegant lines in fall-front desks and rocking chairs, the sumptuous details of wall sconces and leaded-glass table lamps, and the simplicity of window curtains and rugs that had been designed and lovingly crafted by masters.

They also compared stories of late-night encounters with the ghost of Aunt Julia, the maiden sister of Mary Gamble who had lived and died in the house – a benign spirit by all accounts.

It was 1981 when McLeod first moved into the Gamble House. She was in her senior year of her bachelor’s in architecture and stayed an extra year to earn the BArch degree.

McLeod vividly recalls cooking her own meals in the house’s airy, splendidly functional kitchen, and curling up with a good book in the living room’s inglenook. (Such casual use of the house’s irreplaceable treasures has long since been abolished. Today’s scholars do their cooking in the caterer’s kitchen located in the basement.)

However, unlike the other scholars at the reunion, McLeod found her way back to the Gamble House in 2004 – not as a resident scholar, but as the project architect who, along with Historic Resources Group and Griswold Conservation Associates, implemented a $3.8 million “conservation” of the rambling, 8,200-square-foot Craftsman.

She had visited often in the interim, of course. The day of the earthquake, she was there as a guest lecturer with USC architecture professor Kevin Breisch’s summer certificate program in preservation architecture. The 15-day seminar, now in its 16th year and believed to be the only one of its kind in the region, attracts an eclectic mix of scholars, architecture students, working architects, city planners and Arts and Crafts enthusiasts.

McLeod leads many such tours. A week before the Huntington exhibition was to open, she again found herself at the Gamble House, joining lecturer Ted Wells ’81 and USC professor Victor Regnier for his class, “L.A. Architecture, Houses of L.A.”

These days, she is expanding into new areas of preservation and restoration. Last February, McLeod accompanied Breisch and USC architecture dean Qingyun Ma on a trip to the ancient village of Lijiang, a UNESCO site close to the Tibetan border of China. The village faces a variety of preservation issues, not the least of them the threat of a devastating earthquake.

“The questions surrounding preservation of cultural resources can be universal,” says McLeod. “How do you keep an ancient site vital and economically viable? What kind of new development is appropriate?” She will soon be answering those questions in an architectural preservation course that Ma has asked her to teach for USC in China.

Experience has taught her that conservation practices can vary greatly from culture to culture. As night settled over Lijiang, McLeod was disheartened to see every traditional roof eave lit with red neon. On the other hand, she was enchanted by the Chinese commitment to recycling materials.

“While exploring off-the-beaten-track villages, we saw stockpiles of beautiful wood beams with dragon carvings on the ends and quantities of large cut stones from structures that had fallen down, and had to wonder how many hundreds of years old these saved materials were.

“We then recognized these same materials being used in reconstructed buildings lost to recent earthquakes – great examples of adaptive reuse and sustainability.”

Thinking back, McLeod vividly recalls the bemused stares of Italians she met more than 20 years ago, while studying in Rome the summer of her senior year. “What? Are you kidding?” they had asked when she told them she lived in a historic home built in 1908. “What’s historic about it?”

For McLeod, all roads lead back to the Gamble House.

“I’m still learning from the Greenes, and after nearly 30 years, I am still learning from the Gamble House. The house has given me so many gifts, and now I’m back as part of the scholar-in-residence family, an alumna, a practicing architect and a lecturer. I feel very honored to have come full circle, and to be in a position to give back.”

– Diane Krieger