Recent Articles From The Craftsman Bungalow
This year the Architectural Heritage Center expanded their Annual Kitchen Revival Tour beyond just kitchens to showcase entire homes, and re-named the tour the Portland Old House Revival Tour. I’ve covered this tour for the past three years, and now in its 16th year overall, the tour never disappoints. In case you missed it, here...
Perhaps it was serendipitous that a internationally recognized horticulturist would end up living in a home that once belonged to a descendant of John Olmsted, the prominent landscape architect who designed countless parks and public spaces across the country. But that’s exactly what happened. First moving to the property as a renter in 1995, Sean...
The William T. Bolton House in Pasadena, California is a prime example of Charles and Henry Greene’s early emerging California Arts & Crafts aesthetic. Taking its name from the prominent physician who commissioned it in 1906, the home predates Greene & Greene’s larger commissions – including the Gamble and Blacker houses – and introduces several more...
This article is Part Two of a two part series highlighting the homes that Frank Lloyd Wright designed in Oak Park, Illinois during the years 1900 to 1913. Part One focused on his transition to the Prairie Style and the Oak Park homes he designed from 1889-1899. During the years of 1889 to 1899, Frank Lloyd...
I was fortunate to recently travel to Hawaii for business and while looking for a place to stay – away from the hustle and bustle of tourist-packed Waikiki – I was thrilled when I came across the beautiful Manoa Valley Inn. Originally built in 1915 by an Iowa lumber baron named Milton Moore, the house...
To understand what we were dealing with when we initially bought the house, let’s go back to late 2009… This is what the exterior looked like when we first moved in (we have since painted it). I came to find out later that the house had been for sale earlier in 2009 through a realtor,...
I couldn’t be happier to share the news that our home is featured in the Family Album section of the Fall 2012 issue of American Bungalow! Those of you who are familiar with the magazine will recognize the Family Album section, where readers submit pictures of their home with a short blurb about the story...
Somewhere near the intersection of rustic charm and stately elegance is a place where natural beauty and cooperative humanity walk hand-in-hand. Nestled a few thousand feet beneath the rugged 11,249 foot peak of Oregon’s Mount Hood, the iconic Timberline Lodge has been welcoming weary hikers, giddy newly-weds – and everything in between – for over...
The Adirondack Mountains of Upstate New York have long been recognized for their rugged wilderness and unspoiled natural wonder. There’s a peaceful sense of timelessness here – a feeling of quiet isolation that hearkens back to those early rustic days when frontiersmen settled here and built their cabins from the fabric of the land itself. ...
Diana Gillispie’s eye for design and acute attention to detail has made her a fixture in the Asheville, North Carolina art scene for more than three decades. Having first moved to the area in 1978, she became one of the pioneering artists of Asheville’s River District when she started a small pottery studio with a...
The Architectural Heritage Center’s Portland Kitchen Revival Tour is one of my favorite days of the year, and 16th annual edition was again full of beautiful homes, whose kitchen – and in most cases much more – have been impeccably restored to reflect the home’s original period design. This is my third year covering the...
As you may recall, on a recent business trip to Hawaii I stayed at a lovely family-run bed & breakfast rather than one of the impersonal mega hotels in Waikiki. While staying there, I got into a routine of taking a walk around the neighborhood every day and was blown away by the concentration of...
The bungalow that we’re currently restoring is actually the second bungalow restoration that we’ve undertaken. Our first was a 1927 English Cottage style bungalow, also in Portland. Below is a picture of the finished kitchen… The house was in overall good condition, and while the kitchen was functional, it was rather tired looking and in need...
If you haven’t had the opportunity to see an authentic Greene & Greene-designed home up close, then a visit to The Lodge at Torrey Pines might be the next best thing. Taking its design cues from two of the Greenes’ most iconic “ultimate bungalows,” The Blacker House (1907) and The Gamble House (1908), both in Pasadena, the...
From the late 1800’s until the mid-1940’s, Pabst Brewery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin was the largest brewer in America, and at times, the world. Originally established in 1844 as the Best Brewery – named after its founder, Jacob Best – the name changed to Pabst in 1889 when Best’s son-in-law, Frederick Pabst, became majority stockholder in...
The Mission Hills neighborhood of San Diego, California has long been a bastion of early 20th century homes, with nearly all of era’s requisite architectural styles well-represented. From compact single-story bungalows to expansive Spanish haciendas – and everything in between – Mission Hills exhibits the same architectural prowess today as it did when it was...
In light of the two recent great deals I’ve found on Craigslist (the oak desk and the Stickley nightstand), I thought I’d take the opportunity to show you some of the other Arts & Crafts items I’ve acquired through the site. It’s no secret that it can be very expensive to furnish your bungalow home...
Some time ago, we took a trip down the California Coast during which we explored some of the countless arts & crafts cottages in and around the oceanside artist community of Carmel. The highlight of our time there was getting to take a tour of Tor House – the handcrafted stone cottage of poet Robinson...
Filmmaker Joaquin Montalvan always knew he wanted to live in a bungalow – even before he knew what a bungalow was. Growing up, he had lived in a Spanish Mission style home with a welcoming front porch, hardwood floors and a fireplace that his family frequently used. Those three features were ingrained in his mind...
San Francisco is well known for its abundance of elegant Victorian architecture, but tucked away among the tens of thousands of Victorians, there exists a small enclave full of hundreds of charming bungalows. Westwood Park, located just south of Mount Davidson, was originally a grove of tall eucalyptus trees – part of an old Mexican...
With all of the traveling I’ve been doing for work recently, I haven’t had much time to write about some of the other things we’ve done to the house since we’ve moved in. If you remember my earlier post entitled Peeling Back The Layers, you’ll recall that the whole first floor had wall-to-wall carpeting and...
Frank Lloyd Wright designed well over 1,000 homes and buildings throughout his illustrious career, but only one of those structures was built in the State of Oregon: The Gordon House. Commissioned by Conrad and Evelyn Gordon, the 88-year-old Wright designed the home in his Usonian style in 1957 for the couple’s sprawling farmland acreage that...
With its rich history and sunny Mediterranean climate, Santa Barbara has been an immensely popular destination since being settled by Spanish Missionaries in the late 1700’s. Following its annexation by the United States in 1846 after the Mexican-American War, Santa Barbara quickly expanded. Through the mid and late 1800’s, the city was home to countless...
This article is the continuation of Timberline Lodge: The Quintessential American Alpine Lodge, Part One, in which I explored the lodge’s genesis and its historically fast construction which took place over the course of 15 months in 1936-37. Now I’ll take you inside this storied lodge on a personal tour through its hallowed halls… As...
When Phillip Myer of Ragsdale Home Furnishings built his first table lamp way back in junior high school, he never imagined that one day, he’d be doing it for a living. But in 1999, more than 25 years after building that first fateful lamp, Phil quit his job in the high-tech electronics industry and embarked...
With all of the basic stuff done at our new house, the focus has shifted to the big stuff. Our wishlist started with just remodeling the kitchen and bathrooms and building a new garage, but has quickly ballooned to include adding on a new master suite above the garage, as well as adding a second...
For a time, the Ross House was known by everyone who lived near it as simply “The Purple House.” It had lilac trim on the windows, and there was an odd purple-ish addition that had been added to the front. It was an authentic Frank Lloyd Wright house, built in 1916, but its current state...
Welcome to The Craftsman Bungalow! My goal for this site is for it to become a resource for people who love old homes – and more specifically – Arts & Crafts, Craftsman, and Bungalow home enthusiasts. Hopefully along the way, I’ll learn some things, you’ll learn some things, and knowledge, experience, and inspiration about living...
When Sandy Evans and her husband Richard Herbold purchased this handsome 1915 bungalow in Delmar, New York, it was about to turn 100 years old. But on the inside, its previous owners had tried to re-imagine its interior as a contemporary, industrial space that more resembled a post-modern office building than a cozy, century-old residence. ...
This past week we traveled cross-country to spend Thanksgiving with family, friends and neighbors in the rural New Jersey town I grew up in. One of the many highlights of the week (in addition to celebrating my parents’ birthdays and their anniversary) was to spend some quality time with Carol Wilbur who lives in the...
