1925, North Bay, Scrutton house
15 Brown Court, Petaluma
Julia Morgan
By 1925 the Colonial Revival had become a different and more literate style than it was around the turn of the century. One wonders if the shingles were always painted (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 255).
1925, Russian Hill, Jules Suppo house and studio
2423-25 Polk Street, San Francisco
Julia Morgan
The moral fervor relating to nature extended to near fanaticism about health. Raising vegetables at home, maintaining a vegetarian diet, drinking coffee substitutes, taking ice-cold showers, sleeping in the open air (hence the need for "sleeping porches"), and pursuing fitness through jogging, swimming, hiking, and dress reform-all became part of the crusade. Julia Morgan knew the Maybecks and other members of the Hillside Club and shared many of their aesthetic ideas, if not the related moral commitments (she was reported by her wood-carver Jules Suppo to prefer lamb chops for dinner and to drink coffee morning and night).
Morgan was the only prominent member of the group of architects interested in the Crafts movement who was born in California; the others all arrived as adults: Mullgardt from Saint Louis, Maybeck from New York, Ernest Coxhead from England, Polk from Kansas City, and the Greene brothers from Ohio. Her own deep response to nature and to the local environment reinforced her interest in the Crafts principles of building simply and in harmony with the site. While she was in Paris, from 1896 to 1902, she had a subscription to The Architect magazine and also had access to British architectural periodicals, which must have familiarized her with what Morris's followers were doing. At the same time, her interest in medieval guilds, the Italian hill towns, and Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc's medievalism was as important a part of her education as the rational theory of the Beaux-Arts course. Thus, she was not unprepared for building in the Crafts tradition, although her engineering background and classical training made her aware how difficult it was to achieve a "simple" building (Boutelle 1988: 10).
Morgan designed quite a different kind of structure in 1925 for one of her favorite workmen, Swiss wood-carver Jules Suppo. Suppo refused to leave San Francisco and his family for commissions at San Simeon and Wyntoo9n, so Morgan arranged for him to do the work in the city and ship it to the sites. She designed a two-story house for him on Polk Street, with the ground floor serving as shop and workroom; the apartments above (later enlarged by a penthouse) were entered by a separate door. The two doorways gave Suppo an opportunity to flaunt his wood-carving skills. The door to the shop shows consummate skill in combining a frank advertisement at the bottom with densely carved figures inhabiting the sea, the forests, and the skies, the whole surmounted by an ornamental presentation of Suppo's name and business under a basket of flowers. The other door, of matching wood, has more restrained, classical ornamentation-above the door are flowers and fluttering birds perched on a dish of fruit. A balcony serving three tall windows with ornamented shutters has richly carved spindles and corner pieces, while the brackets are in the form of childlike figures biting into the fruit. Just under the cornice is a classical frieze featuring the shields of Switzerland and of Suppo's canton. The whole building is a Crafts gem, an affectionate tribute to a fine artisan (Boutelle 1988: 143).
c. 1925, East Bay, House
65 Sea View Dr., Piedmont
Julia Morgan
This is a baronial manor to be compared with 2509 Claremont Blvd. in Berkeley (Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 284).
c. 1925, Pacific Heights, Julia Morgan houses
2229 and 2231 Divisadero St., San Francisco
Julia Morgan
Some of Morgan's Italianate designs were achieved by remodeling. When her mother's illness made it impractical to keep up the family house in Oakland, in the mid-1920s Morgan bought two Victorian two-story houses (with attics and basements) on Divisadero Street in San Francisco, remodeling one into an apartment for herself plus two apartments to rent. The second house, actually a rusticated stone foundation and "piano nobile," became a kind of Italian villa, which she rented after taking off the two top floors in order to give more light to the apartments.
Remodeling of two Victorian houses into apartments (Boutelle 1988: 160, 259).
1926, North Bay, Margaret Stewart house
Benbow Valley, Garberville
Julia Morgan
Morgan was commissioned in 1926 by San Francisco hotel owner Margaret Stewart to build the first element of what was to be a summer-winter resort on Lake Benbow, near Eureka in northern California. Only Stewart's house and a nearby hotel ever materialized, constructed in half-timbering above brick. With sun porches and sleeping porches ready for any climate, this large house on the lake represented the client's dream of a Scottish manor. There is a guesthouse and garage with service apartments above, while the story-and-a-half living room of 820 square feet was planned to be used as a Christian Science reading room. After a prolonged period of neglect, the house was now been carefully restored, and it is greatly cherished by its current owners. (Boutelle 1988: 154, 260).
1926-30, East Bay, Chapel of the Chimes, California Crematorium
4499 Piedmont Ave., Oakland
Julia Morgan
Morgan's inventive view of the Gothic (Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 301).
No comment (Boutelle 1988: 260).
1927, East Bay, John Galen Howard house: library wing
1401 LeRoy Ave., Berkeley
Julia Morgan
Designed in an L-shape to follow the lot frontage, this long, shingled house shows how much [John Galen] Howard's eastern-formality was modified by western informality. Julia Morgan added a library wing to the north end in 1927 (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 211).
Designed in an "L" shape to follow the lot line, this long, horizontal, shingled house shows the degree to which the style of an eastern establishment architect [John Galen Howard] was influenced by western informality. Julia Morgan added a library wing in 1927, so skillfully integrated that it seems part of the original design (Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 257).
1928, East Bay, Seldon and Elizabteh Glide Williams house
2821 Claremont Ave., Berkeley
Julia Morgan
This is a restrained mansion with Venetian Gothic tracery windows (Gebhard 1985:257).
Julia Morgan's elaborate design for the Berkeley Women's City Club (2315 Durant Street, 1923) drew on Moorish architecture; her Selden Williams house (2821 Claremont Boulevard, Berkeley, 1926) had a sheltered interior courtyard with central fountain and path-crossed garden and a heavy tile roof atop rough-cut beams and cream-colored walls.
Fig. 70 Julia Morgan, Selden Williams house, 2821 Claremont Blvd., Berkeley, California, 1926. Porch mural shows Mission inspiration. Photograph by Ambur Hiken (Freudenheim and Sussman 1974: 83).
By examining in detail a palatial dwelling designed by Morgan in 1928, chosen for its beauty and present fidelity to her original intentions, one can begin to understand how well she met the needs of her clients and how her solutions relate to contemporary patterns of living. The large, blocky, concrete house on Claremont Avenue in Berkeley was designed for Seldon and Elizabeth Glide Williams. It makes a first impression of formal symmetry, with seven tall shuttered windows evenly spaced across the second floor. The iron-grilled balcony over the wide front door and the broad windows recall the Mediterranean style, as does the red-tile roof.
Quoining punctuates the corners, while the wing to the west (at right) has Venetian Gothic windows on all three exteriors.
When the heavy front door opens, it seems to invite a procession: the spacious living hall, with its glow of dark wood and Oriental carpets, leads the eye up to a landing, where a great window with Gothic tracery and crowned by a large della Robbia wreath brought by Morgan from Florence looks out on a garden courtyard. A glance back to the front door reveals a wrought-iron gallery at the landing above, a broad expanse with heavy carved doors opening to the living and dining rooms, and an arched entrance into a library. Ornament is pervasive: large cast-stone screens mask even the radiators, set into the walls. A Moorish window gives an exotic touch as it lights the stairway upstairs. Off the hall is a series of guest bedrooms separated from the service wing by a glass-paneled door. At the front of this floor is a large room with balcony and its own bath, while the west wing is like a separate apartment, with two oversize bedrooms (one with a splendid fireplace), a dressing room, two baths, a small but efficient kitchen, and a glazed sitting room that must have been planned as a sleeping porch.
Downstairs, both living room and dining room have similar friezes of gumwood cut to resemble a stencil. The walls are plaster, painted to harmonize with the fresco around the front door. A small hidden closet near the door receives mail from a slot outside. The east wing, for kitchen and service activities, includes a brightly daylighted breakfast room with stenciled frieze and patterned marble floor, facing the garden. In position this corresponds to the west wing's wood-paneled library-study, which connects with a marble-floored conservatory that also has doors opening to the living room and to the garden; the conservatory's wicker furniture underscores the indoor-outdoor relationship.
The circulation in this building makes it convenient for moving and serving large crowds: refreshments might be served in the conservatory, for example, or out in the garden, where an Italianate fresco suggests the atmosphere of a cloister, reinforced by the use of columns. To paint this mural Morgan hired Maxine Albro, an artist who became known during the 1930s for her murals in Coit Tower and in other public buildings in the Bay Area.
The only part of the house that has required recent alterations is the large kitchen, whose octagonal-tile countertops, wood cabinets, and huge old stove had come to seem old-fashioned. It was remodeled with the latest restaurant equipment, including wide ovens suited to caterers as well as smaller ones for the individual housekeeper; the upper cabinets next to the windows were retained as models for the new construction. The furnace, boiler room, and some of the plumbing required the attention of the Rankin Plumbing Co., still run by the son of the man responsible for the original installation. Space for a wine cellar and storage already existed.
When they commissioned the house the clients were planning for an active social life, but Seldon Williams died after they had been in the house only a year or two. His wife retreated to the upstairs apartment, closed the rest of the house except for periodic cleaning, and almost never left it for the forty-two years until her death in her nineties. She kept the furniture covered and the house intact in its 1928 splendor during all that time, maintaining it with the help of a part-time maid and a gardener. Just before she died in 1970, she agreed to sell it to a committee of friends of the University of California for use as the vice president's house, with proceeds to go to a charity she favored. The original Italian furniture was still in place and much of it was sold with the house.
It is a victory for historic preservation to have such a house continue to function as it was originally planned. Even the orientation is well suited to welcoming numerous visitors throughout the day, as Morgan's concern for light has given the morning sunshine to the breakfast room, library, and conservatory as well as to the entrance hall, while the large rooms for entertaining have the afternoon sun. Stately and comfortable, this is a house very close to the eye and hand of the architect.
See also 1911 (Boutelle 1988: 163-66, 260).
1928, Haight-Ashbury, Native Daughters of the Golden West building
500 Baker St., San Francisco
Julia Morgan
No comment (Boutelle 1988: 260).
1928, Northern California, Asilomar: Merrill Hall
Pacific Grove
Julia Morgan
The most important addition to Asilomar in this period [post WWI] was the auditorium, Merrill Hall (1928), designed to seat a thousand. Again made of local wood and stone, this large rectangular hall has natural lighting from French doors and clerestory windows framed in laminated wood arches. Open trusses with brass braces, nuts, and lighting fixtures make this elegant building a rusticated rather than a rustic version of Crafts architecture. Morgan alleviated the long stretches of unpainted wood by adding colorful stenciled friezes of seashells, sea horses, and the like, which celebrate the site and remind conference-goers of where they sit.
Merrill Hall exhibits all the characteristics that make Morgan's Crafts residences so appealing, although its very size was a distinct departure from the scale of most Crafts structures. Surrounded by Monterey pines and cedars and sited on a slight rise above the original center of the complex, the building emerges from stone and sand like one of the natural elements. Reflecting the client's and the architect's feeling for preserving the landscape, it clearly was built from the inside out, with an economy of means emphasized by leaving the structural elements visible.
Designed so successfully that it seems to have grown naturally on the site, Asilomar is perhaps the largest institutional complex ever built in the Arts and Crafts style. A California State monument since 1958, it is still being used as a conference center and is one of the two most profitable units in the state park system, San Simeon being the other (Boutelle 1988: 93, 95, 255).
