Owner of Historic Bungalow Sees Meaning in Every Aspect of Home

Having fled corporate America for life on a 54-acre Ojai ranch of razor-edged mountains and plunging valleys, Bill Moses now wants to turn the vast spread into a sort of living museum that would be the first of its kind in Ventura County.

Taking center stage is the Pratt House, a 1909 four-bedroom, craftsman-style home once called an “American masterpiece” by Architectural Digest.

It is one of only five so-called ultimate bungalows in the country, the best known of which is the Gamble House in Pasadena. They were designed by architects Charles and Henry Greene during the heyday of the Arts and Crafts movement.

The 39-year-old Moses wants to revitalize the movement with seminars, tours, classes and lectures on his property.

He is the first person in Ventura County to apply for interpretive status for his home, which lets him open his property up to the public for tours, fund-raisers and other events.

“We want to bring the Arts and Crafts movement to life,” said Moses, who paid $1.25 million for the entire property in 1994. “The handcrafting way of living has been lost in its traditional form. There is no expression of craftsmanship like this anymore.”

The Pratt House is a dark, cool place with screened porches, fireplaces, antique fixtures and low-slung roofs.

The ceiling is redwood and rare cedar, lamps are made from World War I artillery shells, lightbulbs glow with old filaments, and antique Stickley furniture is everywhere.

The house was built as a winter home for the wealthy Pratt family of Brooklyn, N.Y. Charles Pratt was a top executive at Standard Oil.

“The house is one of the monuments of American architecture at the turn of the century and a key monument of the Arts and Crafts movement,” said Robert Judson Clark, an expert on that time period and former art history professor at Princeton University.

“It is a wonderful example of a house blended with the landscape.”

Clark, who lives near Berkeley, said the Arts and Crafts period began in Great Britain, partly as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution. It flourished from 1876 to 1916, stressing the use of local materials and craftsmen who made things by hand and not machine.

“The Arts and Crafts people were not bohemians,” Clark said. “They were progressive people who liked stylish things.”

Kim Hocking, a senior county planner, helped write the ordinance that allows homes to become interpretive centers depicting the history and culture of Ventura County.

The idea is to offer incentives to owners of such properties to maintain them, Hocking said. The incentives allow owners to charge admission to the site, to build a second dwelling on the property larger than current regulations allow and to subdivide lots into smaller parcels than otherwise permitted.

“The Pratt House is one of the jewels in our historical necklace,” he said. “There are few residences in the U.S. that are nicer than this and we are lucky to have it.”

Public hearings on the project will be held in November and December, but there hasn’t been any resistance to the plan so far, Hocking said.

Aside from the Pratt and Gamble houses, the other ultimate bungalows are the Thorsen House in Berkeley and the Blacker and Freeman Ford houses in Pasadena.

Born near Youngstown, Ohio, Moses worked as an investment banker in Manhattan before co-founding an airline-reservation company and a medical-diagnostics business.

He eventually moved to Los Angeles, where he helped start a cable station called the Recovery Television Network, which showed programs aimed at substance abusers.

Tired of the hectic life of Los Angeles and not wishing to raise a family in New York City, Moses was looking for a way out. One day, while visiting a friend in Ojai, he came across the Pratt House, which was in disrepair.

“The house instantly struck me,” he said.

He bought the house and as he began rehabilitating it, he underwent a transformation. Life was taking on a balance missing during the years he spent chasing financial success.

So last June, armed with money made on past investments, he quit his cable business to devote himself full-time to the property.

He set up the nonprofit Pratt House Foundation, which provides educational programs at the home for schoolchildren. Money generated from the activities at the house will benefit the foundation, Moses said.

“I get a vicarious charge every time someone comes through and says, ‘Wow, this is great!’ ” he said.

‘We want to bring the Arts and Crafts movement to life.’