The Twentieth-Century House

Looking back a hundred years, we can see the magnitude of the changes that occurred in the opening decades of the twentieth century. In 1900, few houses had electricity; twenty-five years later, nearly two-thirds of all homes were illuminated by electric light. The horseless carriage was merely a rumor to most people in 1900; by the mid-1920s, Henry Ford had sold fifteen million Model Ts. With the growth of the industrial economy, Americans had more money and became increasingly concentrated in urban centers—by the 1920s, the majority of Americans lived in cities for the first time.

Given the rate of change, it's hardly surprising that so many Americans embraced an eclectic variety of homes that shared a common theme: They indulged in a bit of nostalgia, looking backward to the pre-machine age.

The Arts and Crafts movement actually began in England, initiated by the likes of John Ruskin and William Morris as a reaction to an increasingly mechanized world. In the building arts, the traditional joiner-builder no longer had to shape or make anything on site—he assembled parts that had come off the end of a production line. And much of that was surface ornament, such as gingerbread, brackets, and other decorations that had no structural purpose. They were, in a favored term of the day, "dishonest."

In contrast, the Arts and Crafts movement put the emphasis on goods that were simple, inexpensive, comfortable, and produced by hand. Two gifted California builders, the brothers Charles Sumner Greene and Henry Mather Greene, were present at the creation of the Craftsman-style house, building beautifully detailed bungalows of large scale in and around Pasadena. The movement in America was also led by Gustav Stickley, a furniture maker who published an influential magazine called The Craftsman. In its pages, he promoted his philosophy of using natural materials, like unpainted wood, ceramic tile, and wrought iron. He himself made furniture, much of it oak, that today is highly prized. But The Craftsman also featured simple houses like the Bungalow that reflected his philosophy.