The handling of asymmetry in the facade of the Charles Murdock house and the studied casualness of Coxhead's own house at 2421 Green Street present compositional themes the architect explored throughout his career.

The Alonzo McFarland house overlooking the Panhandle in the Haight-Ashbury district, anticipated the Beaux Arts style which swept the city after the turn of the century.

The Chapel of the Holy Innocents at 455 Fair Oaks in the Mission commissioned by the Episcopalean rector E. B. Spaulding is the only remaining example in San Francisco of Coxhead's signature undulating shingled wall.

The seventy-five foot sandstone Prayer Book Cross was presented to Golden Gate Park at the opening of the Midwinter Fair in January of 1894. It now stands hidden on one of the highest hills in the Park, a memorial to the first Christian service officiated in the English language along the California coast, reportedly by Sir Francis Drake's chaplain on June 24, 1579.

• Chapel of the Holy Innocents
• James McGauley house
• Prayer Book Cross
• Charles Murdock house
• Ernest and Almeric Coxhead houses
• Ida and Luella Gillespie house
• Alonzo McFarland house
• Bridge
• Russell Osborn house
• St. Luke's Church

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 & 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).

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).

Extant (Longstreth 1998: 424).

Presented to Golden Gate Park at the opening of the Midwinter Fair in January of 1894 as a memorial of the service held on the shore of Drake's Bay about Saint John Baptist's Day, June 24, 1579. [This was] the first Christian service in the English tongue on the California coast, and the first use of the Book of Common Prayer in the United States (from the legend on the monument).

Prayer Book Cross, created by Ernest Coxhead, stands on one of the higher points in Golden Gate Park. It is located between John F. Kennedy Drive and Park Presidio Drive, near Cross Over Drive. This 75 ft. sandstone cross commemorates the first use of the Book of Common Prayer in California by Sir Francis Drake's chaplain on June 24, 1579 (Text and Photographs Copyright ©1998 David Gardner. All Rights Reserved Worldwide).

An 1893 Polk house and one of Coxhead's designs of 1892 present an interesting series of similarities and contrasts. Coxhead's Murdock house is a San Francisco townhouse clothed in the form and materials of a rustic vernacular. Polk's Rey house climbs a wooded hill in suburban Belvedere but is as tightly packed and introspective as an urban house. Both houses use a vernacular mode as a background for and contrast to specific pieces adapted from high-art European architectural history: but where Coxhead chose the carpenter's wood-frame vernacular, the Rey house references the wood and adobe buildings of early Anglo Monterey. Each house is a series of staggered-level platforms stacked around a stairwell. But where the Rey house is an open, constantly changing spatial progression (a perfect example of the stair-become-a-house), the Murdock house is a series of separate compartments.(Beach 1988: 57, 60, 62, 66, 67).

An equally unconventional solution is present in the Charles Murdock house around the corner [from the Coxhead house], which Coxhead had designed several months earlier. A native of Boston, Murdock moved to California in 1855 and became a widely respected elder of the intellectual community. Murdock ran a small printing business; he considered bookmaking an art and was patronized by some of the region's most gifted writers. Among his friends were Bret Harte, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Muir, and William Keith. While active in the Unitarian church, he had been married by Joseph Worcester and frequently attended his services. Murdock was also an ardent supporter of the younger generation, including Bruce Porter, Gelett Burgess, and Coxhead. Since Murdock, like many of his friends, could not afford to spend much for his house, it was designed with about as much floor area as Coxhead's residence, and at an even lower cost.²²

The studied asymmetry of the facade recalls those of E. W. Godwin's well-known artists' houses in Chelsea from a decade earlier, but here the relationship among elements is only implied (Fig. 79).²³ Set amid a sea of shingles, each opening has a different scale and treatment, and both side elevations abandon ordered composition. The house is a picturesque but basically utilitarian box. In this respect, it bears closer affinity to the small post-medieval dwellings that line the streets of many English towns more than to its urbane London counterparts (Fig. 80).

The exterior gives little clue as to what occurs inside, where the rooms are at split levels set around a tiny central stair (Figs. 81, 82). This skylit vertical core, rendered as if it were a Georgian hall, comes as a complete surprise. Taking a cue from Shaw's plan for 42 Netherhall Gardens, Coxhead placed the stair at the end of a dark, simple, and, like everything else, miniaturized gallery. In the living room above, ornateness and simplicity confront one another in a richly carved fireplace surround isolated by plaster walls that were originally covered with brown paper (Fig. 83)(Longstreth 1998: 132-34).

The quiet exterior of Coxhead's own house at 2421 conceals a marvelous interior, with a long, glazed entrance gallery on the west side running from a high-ceiling living room on the street to the dining room on the rear garden. Upstairs the master bedroom extends into the high gable (Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 42).

The quiet exterior of Coxhead's own house at No. 2421 conceals an ingenious interior, with a long glazed entrance gallery on the west side running from a high-ceilinged living room on the street to the dining room on the rear garden. The master bedroom on the upper floor has a select view through the corner bay window (Woodbridge & Woodbridge 1992: 80-81).

One of Coxhead's interests was the English manor house. His first buildings in Northern California display half timbering, neo-Elizabethan window mullion patterns, and other quaint, period-revival details. These he soon shed. But he had a continuing interest in certain traditional spatial concepts: he frequently integrated into his California houses variations of the Great Hall and Long Gallery of the English country house. In his own house, built in 1893 on a narrow lot in urban San Francisco, the entrance hall is a miniature Long Gallery. The living room, dining room, kitchen, and stairs are all strung along this hall: it functions as a spine, a corridor, and a room. It is many times longer than its width and boasts two fireplaces. The first, in the narrow end wall, near the entrance to the house, performs a symbolic function of welcome. The other, placed in the long wall near the oposite end, faces a square bay which widens the hall enough for a comfortable seating area, providing a pleasant, light place for tea on San Francisco's fog-bound afternoons. This bay overlooks the garden of a small house next door, also designed by Coxhead. The two houses form an ell around the shared open space. The master bedroom upstairs has a high vaulted ceiling with roof-bracing trusses near the top. All details of the room are scaled to increase its apparent size. The windows are small-paned, and closer to the floor than one expects: in one corner at an angle is the entrance to the room with a fireplace on one side and a seat on the other. As long as the door is open it, the fireplace, and the seat remain separate elements; but when the door is closed, these elements are joined to form a cozy inglenook. That the door must be closed to create this private place reinforces the intimate feeling of separatiion from the world outside (Beach 1988: 24).

By 1893 an important shift occurred in Coxhead's approach, evident in the ...residence built for himself and Almeric (Fig. 73). Like the Williams-Polk house, it exploits a difficult site to achieve a dramatic effect. The design is also a more sophisticated interpretation of English precedents than was McGauley's. The narrow street frontage is accentuated by a towerlike facade that has a taut, abstract quality. The bands of little windows set flush against the surface were probably inspired by recent London work of Shaw and others. However, the composition is more simplified and softened than English models, in keeping with the building's size and materials. The west elevation, facing McGauley's yard, with its dominant horizontality and rural character, contrasts with the facade and underscores the transition from public to private space. Expanses of shingled wall and roof surfaces, interrupted only by the simplest window articulation, extend from a pivotal clustering of elements grouped around the front door. The composition may well have been inspired by Voysey's early projects, but Coxhead's version is more compact and mannered at its focal point and less regimented elsewhere. ²⁰ Toward the rear, the house looks somewhat like a Surrey barn that has been remodeled in a straightforward way, lacking the studied poise of the street facade (Fig. 74). Front and rear are set in opposition, while the overriding simplicity of detail lends cohesiveness to the whole. Both the imagery and the studied casualness present in this design owe a major debt to English arts-and-crafts work, which became a guidepost for Coxhead's work during the next several years. ²¹ But neither Coxhead nor Polk considered the Arts and Crafts Movement to be a discrete entity; instead they appear to have viewed it as a potent source for expression in rustic design--an updated equivalent of the Shingle Style--that was appropriate to the design of modest houses.

Coxhead's plans remained more American. In his own residence there is an ever-changing path up to and through the premises, inspired by Polk's work but developed in a different way. The entrance is reached by a series of winding steps and landings that become progressively constricted, with the final run wedged between a retaining wall and the basement, as if it were an alley in an Italian hill town (Figs. 75, 76). A transition occurs at the front door, spatially echoing the change in character between the front and rear portions of the house. Inside, the emphasis is wholly horizontal. The long gallery, the plan's one English component, is unlike its prototypes in that it generates a sense of continuity while dramatizing the site's narrow form through variations in space and light (Fig. 77). From the dark vestibule the corridor gradually becomes brighter, expanding into a glazed bay that serves as a secondary sitting area, with a borrowed vista of McGauley's yard. The gallery brightens further at the end, where windows on two sides open into a secluded garden. In the other direction the space unfolds more rapidly, lapping down a broad turn of steps in a circuitous path to the living room. Although the stair is directly opposite the entrance, it is encased so as not to interrupt the horizontal emphasis. The living room is unusually large for a house of this size and is made even more expansive by grandly scaled redwood paneling and beams (Fig. 78). The living room windows are placed only at the corners, and each one is at a different height. Like a periscope, the highest window bank caches a segment of the McGauley house. At the far corner, the platform and attendant bench offer an observation deck from which to view houses across the street and catch glimpses of the Bay beyond. Paralleling the Williams-Polk house interiors, the sequence and manipulation of each zone imply an extension of space, mitigating the property's narrow confines (Longstreth 1998: 128-29).

(Longstreth 1998: 424).

Coxhead was influenced by the spirit of the new English classicism, but he generally eschewed its repertoire of details. The Alonzo McFarland house (1895) displays an unusual combination of precedents manipulated to meet the constraints of the program, such as a modest budget of about $10,000 (Fig. 151). A sheathing of enormous painted redwood boards and stucco panels is frankly expressed as a veneer, but it helps orchestrate the grand effect. The composition and many of the details are derived from eighteenth-century Palladian country houses, here given proportions that would have left Burlingtonians aghast. The central zone of the facade receives the most decoration, yet its treatment remains ambiguous. Instead of suggesting a temple front as in its English models, this section is recessed and sits on an unusually high base with engaged columns squeezed between other elements. The most ornate piece is the broken pediment over the entry, which is set to one side, and the door is placed in a narrow slot dropped through the base like a utilitarian necessity. This agitated arrangement is visually contained by flanking sections that falsely appear to be at least as large as the central piece by virtue of their bold scale and comparatively simple treatment. Yet even here the windows resist being confined to the stucco panels that enframe them. The antithesis of Palladian discretion, this constant usurping of boundaries imparts a feeling of tenuousness characteristic of Italian mannerism without alluding to any particular examples. The classical language is celebrated as decoration rather than structure--emotive, imposing, and monumental in its effect. The scheme would have seemed unduly restless in a rural setting, but it is well suited to its compact site in a dense urban landscape (Longstreth 1998: 195-96; 424).

At 400 Clayton Street, on the corner of Oak, is a handsome neo-Georgian house, replete with engaged columns, pedimented windows, and a formal entrance. This house catches the eye because its sober exterior stands out among the riotous Victorians nearby. Designed in 1895 by ernest Coxhead for one Alonzo McFarland, the house is an early example of the Beaux Arts style which would sweep the city after the turn of the century (Alexander and Heig 2002: 352).

Ernest Coxhead's manipulation of Classical ornament was so personal as to defy classification. He delighted in overscaling and intertwining traditional motifs and imposing them on plain, boxlike forms (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 127).

(Longstreth 1998: 425).

Another fine shingle-sheathed house (Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 44).

By the mid-1890's, the idea of the rustic city house began to win acceptance among well-to-do businessmen. Following Horatio Livermore's move to Russian Hill, where a rustic ambiance predominated, several contemporaries commissioned sizable rustic houses in Pacific Heights, where such work was still a novelty. These houses are not only larger, but also more elaborate and formal in their expression. At the same time, they possess the same unconventional mix of disparate qualities found in their less expensive counterparts. The house Coxhead designed for insurance broker Russell Osborn is an important example of the larger type (Fig. 84). Inspiration for the exterior appears to have come from seventeenth-century English tradesmen's houses, where classical details and order are mixed with late medieval verticality and picturesqueness (Fig. 85). These dual characteristics are emphasized in the Osborn house, with rustic and refined elements isolated from one another. Elaborate, overscaled Georgian details are concentrated in a single projecting bay, forming an emphatic center axis that stands alone on a large, shingled wall surface. The formal, symmetrical composition and grand scale are opposed by an awkward side bay, which looks like an afterthought but which helps to enliven the elevation and is an integral part of the plan.

All suggestion of rustic informality is abandoned on the interior. Even more than in the Murdock house, the typically English device of arranging spaces of different character in a sequence that elicits surprise and delight is used here. The unfolding of grand allusions behind a placid facade in relatively confined quarters was a favorite eighteenth-century contrivance, one that was now being used by Shaw and his followers in their London houses.²⁴ Here the effect is intensified by the constricted approach from a low, dark vestibule up a straight flight of steps to a skylit central hall, patterned after much larger ones in Georgian country houses (Figs. 86, 87). In the hall, thick, deeply undercut corner moldings bulge from the wall, colliding with one another at junctures and vying for space. But these elements also transform each plane into a giant panel, unrelieved save for small paired windows set at the upper level. The large scale and sense of abstractness is reinforced by the continuous molding on the staircase soffit, which seems to float as it directs the eye diagonally upward. Directly above is a delicate, even fragile, balustrade that contrasts with the adjacent features and with a robust counterpart that screens the stairwell running down to the entrance level. Restlessness also pervades the living room, where Baroque fluidity is combined with Georgian reserve in a most unusual fashion (Fig. 88). The plan itself seems agitated, with great spaces compressed to fit the confines of the lot. Yet a sense of axial order and continuity is maintained by the diagonal alignment of front and rear bay windows with the hall thresholds (Fig. 89).

The design's complexities appear to stem from more than aesthetic factors. Coxhead had to work with a relatively low budget of about $8,000.²⁵ The layout thus conforms to the existing grade, with the entrance level only one room deep and the main floor meeting the slope at the rear. Under these conditions, a straight flight of stairs was the most inexpensive way to connect the two levels. The kitchen had to be adjacent to the dining room, rather than below as was common with an English basement plan. Hence, the main rooms could neither be axially aligned nor reached by a grand staircase from the entrance. Cost was also a likely factor in the inexpensive exterior treatment, which allowed more money to be spent on the fittings inside. Nevertheless, the fact that such imagery was used on an otherwise formal townhouse indicates the increasing respectability of rustic expression (Longstreth 1998: 134-40).

Project designed by Ernest Coxhead between 1894 and approximately 1896 and built in 1898 by Albert Sutton (Longstreth 1998: 425).