• St. John's Episcopal Church, Guildhall
• Chapel of the Holy Innocents
• St. John's Episcopal Church
• Chapel of St. John the Evangelist Episcopal Church
• David Greenleaf house
• James McGauley house
• St. Peter's Episcopal Church
• Andrew Carrigan house
• Cedar Gables (former Edward Wilder Churchill house)
• Speculative building for Geo. Whittell
• Abbreviations

The Guildhall is a mixture of Queen Anne style with a little Richardsonian Romanesque added. Though not designed by Coxhead, the church closely follows his early sketches for the building (Longstreth 1998: 422; Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 421).

In his early practice Coxhead was one of the great masters of the undulating shingled wall, and here, tucked away on this quiet street, is his surviving local example (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 177).

A remnant, now half hidden, of early undulating shingle Coxhead. The porch was added in 1913. Fair Oaks also boasts a number of interesting Stick-style houses (Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 106; Beach 1988: 11).

For a history of the parish [of St. John's], see Rev. D. O. Kelley, History of the Diocese in California (San Francisco, 1915), pp. 343, 356, which notes that the church was built largely on the initiative of its rector, E. B. Spaulding. Spaulding subsequently commissioned Coxhead to design the chapels for two new missions: Holy Innocents in San Francisco and St. John the Evangelist, Del Monte. St. John's cost around $45,000 (Longstreth 1998: 374 n.30).

In his St. John's Episcopal Church in Petaluma (c. 1890) he created an entrance screen composed of a pair of tiny Ionic columns, set on a single one below, and above the arched entrance is a curved broken pediment (Baroque?) in the middle of which he set a Mission Revival quatrefoil window. Now all of these historic rummagings which Coxhead used were being used elsewhere in the East and Midwest, in the early work of Ralph Adams Cram in and around Boston, or in the Midwestern work of Cass Gilbert. But what separates Coxhead's work from the others is the open contradiction of these elements, a contradiction which constitues the building's basic visual statement (Beach 1988: 10).

One of the Bay Area's architectural landmarks and one of the finest of Coxhead's many Episcopal churches, this one displays his distinctive way of wrapping shingles around forms. The interior is as good as the exterior (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 252).

Coxhead, who might be called the official Episcopalian architect in the late 80s and early 90s, worked his usual magic here. The feeling is a fairy-tale church out of an imaginary English countryside. The entrance porch should be particularly noted since it is a playful interpretation of English Queen Anne decoration. One wishes that the shingles had not been painted (Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 374; Longstreth 1998: 422).

This small church is one of the great Shingle Style buildings in California, and it is unquestionably one of the most enticing of Coxhead's churches. The surface pattern of the shingles changes and varies, sometimes curving up and over to emphasize a window or a door, or an occasion to draw attention to dormers and windowhoods. The scale of the church is that of the perfect doll house (even though it was cut in two and extended). This is best seen on the south side of the building where the roof is brought close to the ground, and the door and window protrude into the low roof. The child-like quality of the exterior is equally realized within, where space and details are reduced to an Alice in Wonderland world. The building was moved to its present site and at that time a new entrance vestibule was added. The present composition shingle roof unfortunately destroys the continuity of surface which originally existed, for the wood shingles were carried around the curved eave line tying the walls and roof surfaces together (Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 460, 565).

His St. John's Episcopal Church in Monterey (1891) carries its surface pattern of straight and wavy shingles down over the roof and the eaves onto the walls, and, like the bark of a tree, right down to the ground (Beach 1988: 10, 11).

Coxhead also exhibited a new flexibility in dealing with buildings of different size. Many of his commissions from the early 1890s were for small parish churches and chapels, where he avoided the complexities of form, space, and historical allusion present in bigger work. The finest example of the modest projects is the Chapel of St. John the Evangelist near Monterey (1890-1891) (Fig. 54). Originally located on the grounds of the Del Monte Hotel, one of the West Coast's most fashionable resorts, the building was erected at the initiative of the rector of St. John's, San Francisco, as part of his drive to regain the parish's former stature. In form, the chapel is little more than a barn, and the tower and facade treatment are the principal indicators of its function. Contributing to this simplicity is the coat of shingels draped over the mass like rolled thatch. This treatment, combined with the miniature scale of the elements, introduces a sense of fantasy that is more pronounced than in most ecclesiastical designs of the period. Like Coxhead's quick sketches of English hamlets, the church is an idealized depiction of pastoral innocence--imagery quite appropriate to the carefree atmoshpere of an exclusive watering place. The interior is equally simple and consistent in its allusions, creating an effect at once straightforward and slightly unreal (Fig. 55). Here is a storybook vision of the archetypal English country church, an interpretation strikingly similar to that of the English cottage then emerging in the work of Charles Voysey.

For a history of the parish, see Rev. D. O. Kelley, History of the Diocese in California (San Francisco, 1915), pp. 343, 356, which notes that the church was built largely on the initiative of its rector, E. B. Spaulding. Spaulding subsequently commissioned Coxhead to design the chapels for two new missions: Holy Innocents in San Francisco and St. John the Evangelist, Del Monte. St. John's cost around $45,000 (Longstreth 1998: 104-05; 374 n.30).

St. John the Evangelist, 1890, dubbed "St. Roofus" by the public because of the near-enveloping shingled roof that spilled down from a massive central tower (Weinstein 2004).

The interior of this house has been altered, but the entrance sequence and first floor hall are intact. It is open to the public (Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 315).

An even greater affinity [cf. Churchill house, c.1892] exists with the David Greenleaf house in Alameda (ca. 1892), illustrated in Sally Woodbridge, ed., Bay Area Houses (New York, 1976), pp. 30-31 (there it is incorrectly spelled Greenlease). Indeed, the two houses are identical, save for details and a few aspects of their plans. Yet no written documentation exists for the Greenleaf house either. The closest thing to proof is contained in J. Cather Newsom's Modern Homes of California (San Francisco, 1893), where he cites Coxhead as among the architects whose work is illustrated and where a photograph of the Greenleaf house is included. It is the only house in Newsom's book that could possibly have been designed by Coxhead. The Greenleaf house is also too individual a solution and bears too many of Coxhead's stylistic traits to suggest that it was designed by another architect copying the Churchill house (Longstreth 1998: 378 n.11, 379 n.15, 423)

This [spatial qualities which seem derived specifically from the stairwell spaces of some of the grander Queen Anne/Shingle Style houses of the East Coast] is clearly seen in two of Coxhead's houses from the early 1890's which are essentially expanded stairways: Coxhead's own second house in San Mateo and the Greenlease (sic) house in Alameda. The Greenlease (sic) house is a more ample version than Coxhead's own, but they are basically identical in spatial concept. Each is entered through a low enclosed space which is in fact tucked beneath a stairlanding (a frequent device of Coxhead's). From there a series of steps leads through a brightly lit, open space to a landing which is extended to become the main living space. Then the stair turns and continues its interrupted flight to the platform which defines the ceiling of the low entrance space. In Coxhead's house this landing is simply that; a landing. In the Greenlease (sic) house the platform is again expanded, into a sitting area and gallery overlooking the main space. In both cases the stair continues its journey from this second platform to the second floor (Beach 1988: 27, 30, 31).

Coxhead began to receive commissions for small houses in Pacific Heights at about the time of Polk's first work on Russian Hill. Coxhead's earliest designs, such as that for friend James McGauley (1891), adhere to the prevailing pattern in their use of suburban imagery. McGauley's house is, in effect, a transplanted English cottage (Longstreth 1998: 128, 423; Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 42).

A delightful, characteristic Coxhead church, dollhouse in scale, sheathed in shingles and topped by a witchhat shingle tower. Minimal remodeling inside and out has not interfered with the original conception (Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 347, 515; Longstreth 1998: 423).

A restrained Shingle Style house appropriately chosen by the North Shore Railroad for use in its brochure of 1902 as an example of the stately manor presiding over the open countryside (Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 226).

The mannered forms and spatial freedom of the Churchill house are developed within a more historicizing, English-inspired framework for the residence of Andrew Carrigan, which was probably designed a few months later.¹² Located atop a grassy knoll amid open fields in the Ross Valley, the exterior composition is controlled, with an eclectic assemblage of elements subordinated to the long, rectangular block (Fig. 102). A deep side porch both extends and erodes this mass. An enormous adjacent bay bulges out to provide a focal point, agitated by stepped windows that march up to the far corner, there to be halted by a sham buttress. The rest of the composition is calm and almost symmetrical, with a small Tuscan portico affording a focal point for this unobtrusive ordering of elements. The Carrigan house conveys a sense of age to a greater degree than in Coxhead's previous designs. The eccentric Tudor bay, capped by a Georgian cornice and braced by a medieval buttress, the Tuscan columns, and the bowed dormers are all actors in a pictorial play, as if a simple English barn had been modified and transformed into a small manor house over the course of several centuries. Coxhead had produced such cumulative effects in some of his ecclesiastical buildings, but never in so forthright a manner. Here, each part remains a fragment, and cohesiveness is expressed as an artful, understated collage, possibly influenced by the example of Phillip Webb and other English arts-and-crafts architects. Little precedent existed for this approach in the United States, where the Shingle Style and other contemporary rustic modes tended to unify rather than particularize diverse historical references.

The plan employs a linear arrangement of rooms off a long gallery that was no doubt inspired by published work of Voysey (Figs. 103, 104). Yet the handling of the space is entirely different, emphasizing an American taste for openness. Wide thresholds, large banks of corner windows, and an angled fireplace contribute to the sense of continuity (Figs. 105, 106). Restrained, elegant, and classicizing redwood panels form a thin membrane that enhances this effect. The living and dining rooms are essentially a single space, partitioned only by removable panels set between carved posts. Slight changes in level and window height differentiate the two zones; however, the glazing also forms a band that ties the zones together and, projecting out as a voluminous bay at the juncture of the two rooms, implies an extension of space into the landscape. The ground floor's pervasive horizontality continues up to the stair landing, glazed as if it were a porch and sufficiently large to accommodate a secondary sitting area (Longstreth 1998: 153-57).

Nearly identical to a house that Coxhead designed at the same time for David Greenleaf in Alameda, this Queen Anne house is one of Napa's great treasures; it displays the architect's skillful handling of shingled surfaces (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 242).

A classic Coxhead production combining in an impossible fashion elements of Classical architecture with the vernacular Shingle style. The central round tower with its conical roof supported by four short columns is similar to several other houses designed by this architect (Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 369).

Coxhead buildings appeal to both connoisseurs and casual passers-by with their sensuous, enveloping shingle roofs and amusingly incongruous details, like the immense medieval tower of the Churchill House (today the Cedar Gables Inn in Napa) delicately poised on four slender classical columns.

His homes are remarkably modern in their use of space. Open the pocket doors to the dining room in the Churchill House of 1892 and you have a living area as free flowing as anything sold by Joseph Eichler in the 1950s.

"The sophistication of this open plan would seldom be matched until Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie houses after the turn of the century," scholar Richard Longstreth wrote.

The home won praise at the time as well. "Novelty worthy of imitation," a newspaper observed (Dave Weinstein, Saturday, June 5, 2004, Ernest Coxhead: Strange talents: Idiosyncratic homes helped define bay tradition San Francisco Chronicle).

Among Coxhead's early suburban house commissions was the residence of a young Napa banker, E. Wiler Churchill (1892) (Fig. 98).¹¹ The scheme is a picturesquely composed, mannered tribute to the Shingle Style, with open, flowing spaces inside. The departures are just as pronounced. On the facade, overscaled elements depart from precedent and resist the confines of the building's form. The elevation is horizontally divided into two disparate zones. At the lower level, herringbone brick panels with molded wood surrounds and delicate lead-pane windows form a tapestry of rectilinear patterns. A hulking, barnlike mass looms overhead, topped with a bowed roof that laps around the dormers like a thatch roof. A sense of vertical continuity is provided by the tower, but even it is tenuously poised on a base of four Tuscan columns. At the other end, a large window panel is at once a projecting bay and an extension of the upper zone. Its ambiguous role is heightened by the lateral continuation of the wall plane as an enclosed porch that otherwise seems incidental to the mass.

The emphatic division of the facade into two zones does not correspond to the floor levels inside. The main rooms are raised several feet above the entry, a device Coxhead sometimes used to enrich spatial sequence and to secure privacy from the street. The second story is placed well above the exterior projection. Only the height of the tower soffit matches the spatial disposition behind it. The plan is hardly an afterthought; it is the most remarkable feature of the design (Fig. 99). A single bi-level space, serving as hall, stairwell, and living room, extends the length of the front. Broad flights of stairs run from the cavernous vestibule up to the hall and then back to the mezzanine above, where the tower becomes an expansive, semicircular alcove. Another flight of steps passes along a glazed bay up to the bedrooms (Fig. 100). Sheathed in unmolded redwood paneling, this main room is like a great Tudor hall that has been abstracted and given a relaxed spatial flow. At either end, window bays extend nearly from floor to ceiling. The wall plane in between is penetrated by stretches of windows and by the mezzanine alcove to form alternating bands of solid and void. Wide thresholds connect to the dining room and study, where the woodwork stops at the lintel so that the partition walls read as screens, defining, but not fully enclosing, the space (Fig. 101). The sophistication of this open plan would seldom be matched until Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie houses after the turn of the century (Longstreth 1998: 150-53).

With the Churchill and Carrigan houses, Coxhead showed his mastery of the open plan, but he did not pursue this manner of arranging space as an end unto itself (Longstreth 1998: 157).

An extensive search conducted by John Beach and myself failed to uncover written documentation that Coxhead designed the Churchill house. However, careful examination of the building's design, including its details, reveals too many similarities in personal style for the house to have come from another architect's hand (Longstreth 1998: 378 n.11).

(Longstreth 1998: 379 n. 15, 423).

Now a Bed and Breakfast:Cedar Gables Inn, a Bed and Breakfast.

Extant? (Longstreth 1998: 424).

Abbreviations