The modest Dettner Printing Co. building exhibits a giant keystone over the entrance.

In the the Golden Gate Valley Branch library, the architect used terra cotta in a relatively staid classical design.

The house at 3153 Pacific, remarkable for its freedom in plan and massing, unobtruvisively provides originality in its detailing without making a great point of it.

• Dettner Printing Co.
• Golden Gate Valley Branch Library
• House

The architect's fondness for exaggerated detail appears here in the giant keystone over the entrance, perhaps the only opportunity afforded by the budget to add a little drama to a typically utilitarian building type. The metal-framed ground floor is handsome and well-proportioned (Woodbridge & Woodbridge 1992: 152).

This terra cotta-clad branch library shows Ernest Coxhead in a less inventive format than his other, more freewheeling works that draw on Classical sources (Woodbridge & Woodbridge 1992: 81).

The exigencies of hillside sites encouraged a remarkable freedom in plan and massing that, when combined with fine traditional detail as in Coxhead's work, produced houses that were truly original without self-consciously making a great point of it (Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 43).

Ernest Coxhead used a Prairie School approach on this stucco house in which modular bands of windows and intervening stucco spandrels are projected from the face of the building (Olmsted and Watkins 1969: 285).