OT: How Not to Bungalow

[Somewhere, we have a White Album; pretty much the entire Beatles vinyl output from Meet the Beatles onward, too. Probably in a box somewhere... Pictures of them taken at the Cow Palace in 1965, Candlestick Park in 1966. Such innocent times... Hay, Bungalow Bill, what did you kill Bungalow Bill...]

The Johnson House, Los Angeles. (Photo from the Google Maps, c. 2011; house constructed c. 1910)

While pondering the issue of the Vast Bungalow, I found these images of what not to do -- bungalow-wise -- but what was done by some who adopted the style but not the ethic of the Bungalow Era. I don't recall ever being in a house quite like this one, to tell the truth, but I did visit a few quite fancy places before they were redone in more modern styles.

Note, the Johnson family that built this house in Los Angeles in 1910 really had no idea or concept of what a Bungalow was meant to be. They clearly wanted an up to date house that would be in the fashion of the times, but which would hold both their old stuff (such as the Victoriana you can see in the parlor) and their assemblage of new things, as in the matched suites in the chambers upstairs.

It looks just... wrong.

Several things boggle the mind:

The patterned wall to wall carpeting practically throughout the house. Wall to wall carpeting was a High Victorian affectation that had been largely disposed of during the early 20th Century as uncleanly and unsanitary. In the proper Bungalow style, carpeting was eliminated and rugs were reduced to a minimum -- so as to be easily taken up and beaten to within an inch of their lives at least twice a year over the clothesline in the back. Vacuum cleaners were not unknown in these days. In fact, they were quite popular among those who could afford them (as the Johnsons clearly could.) But the spirit of the times was to eliminate all the potential hiding places for dust, dirt and germs, and that meant eliminating the well-known filth that accumulated in wall to wall carpeting. The Johnsons thought otherwise, it would seem...

The plethora of heavy pseudo Renaissance and High Victorian furnishings, no doubt walnut and mahogany, in all the public rooms and the matched suites of furniture in the chambers upstairs. This violates every precept of the Bungalow style. It's not simply the wretched excess of it all, it is the fundamental incompatibility of the heavy carved look of the furniture with the (relatively) spare woodwork of the house. The woods are wrong, too. Mahogany? Walnut? Never. Bungalows used oak, Douglas fir, and (in California) redwood almost exclusively. Furnishings were made of the same materials, or wicker. The Mission Oak furniture style was standard (and it wasn't just from Stickley and Roycroft. There were many manufactures of the style nationwide and internationally.)  The Mission Oak furnishing style was standard, modern, clean, and most of all, moral. If there were pieces from the previous era, they were kept as artifacts, examples of what not to do. But here we have the Johnsons literally filling their house with such examples. 

The dark, heavy flocked wall papers downstairs and the painted wall papers upstairs... These no doubt were laid on in a futile attempt to match the style of the furnishings with the style of the house. These papers scream Victoriana, almost defiantly so. A proper bungalow would have plain plaster walls, perhaps covered with Japanese style grass cloth, perhaps bare, often colored butterscotch or some other relatively light neutral (pale gray, green, gold, rarely blues or pinks...), sometimes textured, frequently with a paper or stencil border near the ceiling. Alternatively, a proper bungalow might have wood paneled walls, such as we can see in the photos of what appear to be the servants' rooms. The paneling would be made up of narrow planks of tongue and groove pine or fir or redwood, laid directly on the framework. The look would be considered stark but functional. In other rooms, there might be fancier paneling up to the level of a chair rail (though in such rooms as libraries, the paneling might be taken to the ceiling.) The fancier paneling would still utilize the standard woods, however. In the Johnson house, we see what looks like walnut or mahogany paneling in the Better Rooms of the house, and that simply would not happen in a proper bungalow.

The light fixtures in the Better Rooms are some of the most extravagant and baroque I've ever seen from the period. Even the plainest ones seem to be overwrought, though if they are still preserved in the house, they would be considered spectacular examples of early electric lighting fixtures and be coveted by collectors. The table lamps, on the other hand, though also highly collectable today, seem almost chaste by comparison with the ceiling and wall fixtures. In fact, for the most part, the portable lamps would not be out of place in a proper bungalow of the era.

On the other hand, the kitchen, pantries and bathrooms appear to be very straightforward and very up to date according to the precepts of the Bungalow ethic. The kitchen, in fact, is spectacularly modern, with built in cabinetry and countertops, a high-end gas range, and in the pantry an excellent refrigerator. Though it is probably cooled with ice, it is just barely possible that an early mechanical refrigerating plant was installed in the basement to provide remote cooling for the upstairs refrigerator. The flooring is an attractive linoleum, and the walls and cabinetry appear to be painted with white enamel. While there is only one electric light shown in the kitchen and pantry photos, there must have been more. The style suggests they may have been semi-flush mounted ceiling fixtures that are out of the range of the camera.

The bathrooms are fully equipped -- including at least one sitz bath -- and at least one is fully tiled for sanitary cleanliness. The sense of modernity in the kitchen, pantries and baths (for the times) contrasts sharply with the heavy-handed anachronisms of the rest of the house.

Of course part of the problem with the Johnson house is that it is so very big. It seems to go on forever. One of the advantages of its relative defiance of Bungalow style, however, is that no doubt its many rooms did not echo, the floors didn't creak, and while it was not easily cleaned or cared for, there were plenty of servants for that, and it felt relatively homey and comfortable to its residents, as opposed to the more ideologically driven Mission Bungalows that were not intended to be either homey or comfortable but were instead intended to reflect a sense of reform, mission, purpose, simplicity, modernity and -- frankly -- discomfort.

Many issues of Gustav Stickley's "The Craftsman" magazine are available online, and it can be instructive to sit with them for a while to absorb the spiritual essence of the reform he and others working in the Mission/Craftsman Movement were trying for. In a sense, they failed, marvelously, as a "bungalow" like that of the Johnsons' in Los Angeles illustrates. On the other hand, the spirit of the era, and at least something of the style, lives on through deeply passionate and dedicated Bungalow fanatics all over the country and the world.

Back when the Beatles presented us with "The Continuing Story..." the Bungalow was considered a not-so-quaint anachronism from a bygone era. They were being demolished or modernized everywhere; but here and there, some of them were inhabited by the surviving elders who had built them back in the day, and who treasured them as the only real home and hearth they'd ever known. Those Bungalows that had been preserved or that could be restored to their pristine original look are now treasured by younger generations who seek or act on their own mission of reform today.

Hay Bungalow Bill...

The Future -- As It Used To Be

This is a brief article from Gustav Stickley's "The Craftsman" Magazine, March 1911, reporting on a futurist conference in London:

PLANNING FUTURE CITIES

ONE of the possibilities of the city of
the future, as it will be remodeled
from existing cities or built from
the start in accordance with mod-
ern needs were outlined by the town
planning experts who met at the Town
Planning Conference recently held in Lon-
don. The most eminent men in this line,
both in Europe and America, discussed the
subject thoroughly, their deliberations be-
ing aided by maps, drawings and photo-
graphs of the most notable work already
done in this country and abroad, and it is
expected that a fresh impetus will be given
to the remodeling of towns as a result of
this broadening of viewpoint and exchange
of experiences. A prominent part was
taken by Mr. D. H. Burnham, President of
the American National Commission on Fine
Arts, and Mr. Burnham's own feeling is
that the conference will make an imme-
diate and deep impression on the laying out
of cities and towns all over the world.

The most striking prophecy regarding
future cities was made by M. Eugene Hénard,
Municipal Architect of Paris. M.
Hénard confidently predicts that in the near
future light and energy will be conveyed
universally by electricity, while petrol and
oxygen will be depended on to supply heat,
-a comforting thought in view of our di-
minishing wood and coal supply. Also,
every well-equipped house will be supplied
with a private cold-storage plant, refriger-
ated by means of liquid air, a device that
will probably have a good effect on the
price of perishable provisions by putting
within the reach of the people one of the
jobber's chief sources of profit. Another
suggestion that might well be applied dur-
ing the dog days in New York is the recom-
mendation that cold radiators, as well as
heat radiators, be used to keep dwellings at
a comfortable temperature in summer as
well as winter. M. Hénard holds that by
this means each house might be provided
with one or more health chambers, closed
by double windows and doors, in which the
family would be enabled to reap all the
benefits of cool air, full of oxygen, during
the most sultry summer weather.

Another prediction reminds one of Ed-
ward Bellamy's "Looking Backward." It
is that glass verandas of various shapes,
joined together so as to afford protection
to the sidewalks, will ultimately be a fea-
ture of all cities and towns. By such a de-
vice the elusive umbrella would at last re-
ceive its just deserts, for the streets would
be just as dry and comfortable in rainy
weather as they are now on sunny days.
Also, the city of the future, according to
M. Hénard, will have buildings exactly as
high as the street is wide, in which case
New York may achieve within the century
the status of an interesting relic of the past.
The roofs of these houses would be plat-
forms ornamented with shrubbery and
flower-beds, to be used as roof gardens.

The town of the future, as regards its
topography, will offer a marked contrast to
the favorite checkerboard arrangement of
the average American city in that it will be
traversed by large radiating thoroughfares,
partly occupied by moving platforms,
raised above the level of the sidewalk
proper, which will afford a means of quick
communication between the different zones.
The idea is to terminate these platforms by
large revolving crossways, placed at the
intersection of the main streets, so that the
crowds in the most congested districts will
be unable to block the streets.

Dr. Hénard of Paris was surprisingly prescient in his general outlines of the City of the Future, much more so than many other futurists of the era, though his details largely didn't pan out.

This and many other conferences and future planning sessions were generated near the outset of the Progressive Era, that first time through for Progressives that modern-day Progressives seem to have forgotten about. It was a very forward looking period, during which almost anything seemed possible, soon, and it ultimately produced most of the infrastructure we take for granted today.

But the futurist imagination and energy is essentially absent from today's So-Called Progressives. The "Progressive" program seems to consist entirely of delaying and mitigating the slide backward being implemented by rightists, theocrats, and reactionaries at home and world wide. There is no conception of a Future under the circumstances. Only a slightly slower and less brutal return to the past.

Progress? I think not.

A blog to wile away the hours wondering What Happened?: http://www.paleofuture.com/

More Totally OT -- Stickley, Craftsman, Greene and Greene

Those who have followed this blog any length of time know that I have an interest -- shall we say -- in houses and domestic issues, particularly as they relate to the period from about 1900-1960.

The illustration above is interior from Gustav Stickley's "Craftsman Houses" c. 1905 . There are a lot of Craftsman style bungalows in my neighborhood in California, and our place in New Mexico was started right around 1900 and has some Craftsman touches in woodwork and style, although it is not really a "bungalow" at all.

So I enjoy Stickley's magazine ("The Craftsman") and his books of houses that are available online through Google Books. As I page through them, and as I recollect my visits to all sorts of Craftsman bungalows here and elsewhere, I get very strong images of what life must have been like for up to date households at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th Century.

Something tells me it wasn't necessarily very nice all in all.

The Stickley houses are type models of what was Modern then. Their clean lines, built in furnishings, rational floor plans, and adapable spaces were all the height of progress at the time, and these houses were considered to be very easy to live in compared to the overly fussy and badly planned houses of the High Victorian era. Because the Craftsman bungalows were considered so advanced -- and became so popular -- Stickley houses seem relatively "modern" even today, though modern households have to undergo considerable adaptation to live in them. In my California neighborhood, the Craftsman bungalows are treasured, preserved, maintained in pristine condition, or if they have been mucked up over the years, they are restored to pristine condition, and then shown off with enormous pride by their owners.

Their owners scour the shops and online for genuine Stickley Mission Oak furniture, and they pay handsomely for the real thing. Authentic light fixtures, rugs, draperies, plein air paintings in rough oaken frames, family photographs and prints from the first decades of the 20th century (even if they aren't your family), colorfully bound books to fill the glass enclosed bookcases on either side of the copper hooded fireplace, a tall upright piano, all are eagerly sought. Brass or painted iron beds are placed in the bedrooms, bathroom fixtures are original or authentic reproductions.

The only place in these houses where significant changes are made is in the kitchens, which are often in the original houses, very small and dark and dreary. Sometimes the whole back end of the house will be rebuilt to make room for a decent sized and well-windowed modern kitchen. If I can find it, I will post a picture of a bungalow kitchen from about 1915, and it is a horror. It's poorly laid out, it's dark, and it's perhaps the dreariest room you can imagine a person working in, and working as hard as housewives had to work in those days, lighting a fire in the wood stove -- if she didn't have a gas stove yet -- dealing with the ice box out on the back porch, doing the laundry by hand or in a hand-cranked machine using tanks of boiling water, tanks she had to fill and heat on the stove, cooking each meal for hours and hours, and cleaning up in a dark and mildewed corner of the kitchen where all the pipes were exposed and nothing was ever really clean. There was never enough space for all the things she had to do, never enough time, never enough equipment. Just washing the dishes was a major undertaking.



While some of these houses had four or five or sometimes even six bedrooms, there was usually only one bathroom or at most a bath and a half. I've found only one plan with three bathrooms, and one of those was for the servant(s). Some house plans had no bathroom at all.

Bedrooms could be very large or very small, some of them no more than six by seven feet, barely enough room to get a bed into it and turn around.

Rooms were often dark, partly due to the dark oak or other species of woodwork, but also due to the deep porches which shaded the sometimes very large windows of the principal rooms. On the other hand, they were probably not as dark as some of the High Victorian middle class houses they came to replace. Those Victorian houses hid their rooms behind heavy velvet draperies, sometimes layers and layers of them, whereas the Craftsman ideal was for a most a double layer of window draping, and often we see no more than sheer glass curtains at the windows.



There was electricity, and most Craftsman houses were lit by electricity from the outset. But it was usually very dim electric light, maybe the equivalent of 40 watts tops in any one fixture, and often the Craftsman shades for these lights were of heavy colored glass or semi-translucent mica. Thus we see a plethora of fixtures, often four or six wall sconces, and a multi-bulbed center light in each room. Still, the night experience could be quite dim. There were very few electrical outlets in the rooms, and in early Craftsman-type bungalows, the one or two outlets in each room were the screw in kind which were certainly inconvenient to use.

Stickley himself tried heroically to encourage Craftsman afficionadoes to pare their household furnishings to only what was necessary and beautiful. Plain but beautifully made quarter-sawn oak furniture became the standard for bungalows -- as uncomfortable and inconvenient as much of it was. The discomfort of some of these pieces (particularly settles) cannot be overemphasized.



We own some oak pieces from the era, but we have avoided the settles and lounge chairs and such, because they are almost cripplingly uncomfortable (ymmv) -- not to mention cripplingly expensive if they are authentic.

But most of the rooms Stickley showed were sparsely furnished with a single center table, round or oblong, the top often covered with leather, an arm chair or two, a low stool, a drop front desk and chair, one or two lamps, perhaps a Craftsman piano, some pottery, metal ware, and sometimes small landscapes on the walls, and that's it. Everything else was built in or eliminated.



Most people really couldn't live comfortably in this sort of environment so they tended to fill up Craftsman empty spaces with cushioned furniture, bric a brac, odd items, and accessories.



I remember visiting an old friend of the family when I was very young in the early 1950's; she had a large-ish Southern California Craftsman bungalow built I would guess in the early 1920's or perhaps during the late teens. She had painted all that dark oaken woodwork an ivory color. The box beams were also painted ivory. If I remember correctly, she even painted her brick fireplace. She had lots of furniture, none of it Mission Style fumed oak except for her dining set which she and her husband bought when they were first married. Most of the rest was mahogany dating from the Thirties and Forties. She'd painted the dining room built ins, and they were FULL of china. It was spilling out all over the room. There were plants and flowers everywhere. Knicknacks, doilies, fragile ceramic lamps with silk shades, fussy lace curtains, all kinds of 'feminine' appurtenances were applied over the basic Craftsman lines of her house. She was a widow, her husband having died just after the War, and she had lived alone for several years. While she had no intention of leaving her home, she was constantly busy changing it, making it more "modern," and making it more comfortable.

Around here, most of the Craftsman houses have either been preserved as if in aspic or are being re-built as if they had been preserved. "Updating" them is considered little short of a crime. I was visiting neighbors not long ago. They've been working on restoring their bungalow for perhaps ten years, and to my eye it's pretty much done, but they aren't satisfied. Still have to restore the kitchen (modernized sometime in the Fifties). And one of the bedrooms still has paint on the woodwork. But the rest of the house reflects the Craftsman ideals in nearly every respect, even to the point of sparse, uncomfortable furnishings and dim lighting.




Pictured above is one of my favorite neighborhood bungalows. Obviously there's something a bit odd about it. It was built in 1915 as a firehouse, but it was decommissioned years ago and turned into a dwelling. Recently, it was bought by an architect who decided to restore and expand it (it's now actually two units). The results are quite striking. Down the street is a bungalow that's being rebuilt from the ground up:





The epitome of the Craftsman style of domestic architecture are the Greene and Greene houses concentrated in Pasadena but scattered all over California. They are amazing accomplishments of the carpenters', architects', and furniture-makers' arts, exquisite examples of the Craftsman style, and the surviving examples are treated more like temples than homes.

They are dark as caves.

These are some interior and exterior pictures of the Gamble house in Pasadena, taken soon after completion in 1908, just to give you an idea:







One of the houses in my neighborhood that I tried to photograph, not very successfully, is/was like a miniature Greene and Greene house, really very small, but with many of the strong design features that make Greene and Greene houses so unique. The exterior was shingled in weathered redwood (it weathers to a rich black color), with deep overhangs, exposed rafters, "artistic brick" porch columns, deep front porch, big windows, a redwood (rather than oak) interior with heavy box beams, high wainscot, plate rails, brackets, and so on, characteristic brass and copper light fixtures. Stone foundation, artistic brick fireplace chimney. The works.

There were some problems with rot and termites (odd for redwood which has been celebrated for its resistance to such destruction) and so the owners began a renovation project a few years ago, starting with the foundations and moving upwards. In the process, they essentially destroyed the charm of the house. They replaced the redwood shingle siding with what looks like Hardi-cement shingling, in a pedestrian gray color. It's not as bad as the asphalt or asbestos shingling that was put on many houses in the '30's, '40's and '50's, but it's bad. It looks just... wrong. They replaced the windows. This can often be a tragic mistake in and of itself. There is a tendency to put in dual or triple paned windows for energy savings purposes, but often the openings have to be reduced in size, or changed in some other way, and the window style rarely matches the original -- except at very great expense. So too many times, replacement windows in Craftsman houses look completely out of place. In this case the windows are fair reproductions of the orignals, but some of them have that sucked in look that characterizes some dual pane brands.




They painted some of the interior woodwork. The reasons were simple enough. Despite the big windows, the house is heavily shaded by ancient trees, and the interior was dark and gloomy, moreso than your average Craftsman bungalow, and the owners wanted some cheer inside.

Unfortunately, these changes have transformed the house from one that was very unique and delightful (at least if you didn't have to live in it) into something very ordinary -- if you can call any Craftsman house ordinary.

And that's the thing. As much as I admire Craftsman houses, I criticize them for being so dark and sometimes inconvenient. But almost never have I found a Craftsman house that was "ordinary." They may have many similarities, and some are duplicates of one another, but each one has a timeless feel and a unique presence. People who own them love them.

Of course there are lots of online resources availble.

The Gamble House, for example, has a beautiful site online:

http://www.gamblehouse.org/index.html

Greene and Green Archives:

http://www.usc.edu/dept/architecture/greeneandgreene/

Stickley:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_Stickley

The Craftsman:

http://books.google.com/books?id=YhYaAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=the+craftsman

Furniture:

http://www.voorheescraftsman.com/

The Daily Bungalow on Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/daily-bungalow/


And of course there are many, many more.