The Gamble House was the masterpiece of Greene & Greene's new regional style. Built for a wealthy heir of the soap firm Procter and Gamble, the house represents the full aggrandizement and ennoblement of the California bungalow image, yet the building is still striking for its intimacy, intricacy and scale. The relative solidity of the main gabled portions is heightened by the delicate transparency of the Japanese-inspired sleeping porches with their overlapping struts and deep reveals of shadow. The elegance of the overall proportions is continued into the smallest parts and details from the articulation of sliding joints with pegs and tongues to the visual subtlety of tapering beam ends in the balconies. Stunning photography by Tim Street-Porter reveals this house as a genuine and enduring masterpiece.
Edward R. Bosley is Director of the Gamble House. He holds a degree in the history of art from the University of California at Berkeley, where he studied the work of the Greenes first-hand, living for several years in one of their classic, high-period commissions, the W R Thorsen House (1909), a former private residence which now houses students. He has written and lectured extensively on the work of Greene and Greene and is also the author of First Church of Christ, Scientist by Bernard Maybeck in the Architecture in Detail series.