The rambling studio building is inadequately described as eclectic Craftsman.

The building where the Judson family has made stained glass for 70 years is an oddly enchanting place, growing noticeably weary on the outside yet still vital with the spirit of the Craftsman movement that it represents.

Judson Studios stands at the end of a long driveway curving off Avenue 66 just a few paces south of busy York Boulevard.

Yet it seems entirely removed in time and place.

There, the present generation of Judsons and a dozen workers manufacture monumental windows for America’s churches and secular palaces. The most elaborate machinery that they use is an ancient kiln in the basement and a hand tool that is half-knife and half-hammer.

About 200 people briefly entered this timeless workshop Saturday on the annual walking tour of the Highland Park Heritage Trust.

The rambling studio building is inadequately described as eclectic Craftsman. It’s as zany as it is eclectic.

“The original building was built in 1901,” Heritage Trust member Sally Beck told the 1 p.m. tour.

It was three stories, stucco and sported square towers.

“It was sort of what you called Islamic Revival in style,” Beck said.

However, in 1910, a fire burned the third story down.

“They began reconstruction the next day, only they rounded the towers and they decided to turn it into Craftsman style, with the stucco replaced with the shingles that you see.”

At that time, the house was not a stained-glass studio, but the Arts and Architecture School of USC. Its builder, William Lees Judson, was the school’s first dean.

“I guess they didn’t have room out there on the campus, so they came down here,” Beck said.

Judson was also an artist, and the house became the headquarters of the Arroyo Guild of Fellow Craftsmen, the organization that designed furniture and art objects for the illustrious Greene and Greene homes of the era.

The logo of the fellowship, an arm and hammer with the motto “We Can,” appears in a large tile embedded over the main entrance.

When USC moved its Arts and Architecture School back on campus in 1920, Judson’s three sons, who had been making stained glass in a studio downtown, bought the house and set up an operation that has hardly changed.

In a small office just inside the front door, Karen Judson met the group to lead it through several unadorned workrooms.

“We have been in business for 90 years, and my husband Walter is the fourth generation of Judsons to be doing stained glass in Southern California,” she said. “Basically, about 70% of it is church work.”

In the first room, she said, windows are designed and drawn to scale in India ink and watercolor, then enlarged into full-sized drawings called cartoons. The images are transferred onto working drawings and Manila paper that is cut into a separate pattern for each piece of glass.

“Our line drawing is numbered, so we know where each piece goes, so we’re not doing jigsaw puzzles all day,” Judson said.

Next, she demonstrated on a small piece of glass how a worker uses a standard hand tool to cut it to shape.

The glazier, working at a small wooden table nearby, assembles the pieces one at a time, measuring and cutting pieces of lead with the hammer-knife. The hammer end is used to lodge each piece in place temporarily with a horseshoe nail.

“We like to use horseshoe nails because they’re flat,” she said. “A regular nail would tend to break the glass.”

Judson hesitated when someone asked how much a window might cost.

“It’s really hard to determine because it’s such a labor-intensive job,” she said. “It takes from 30 to 40 hours just to glaze it.”

She said the price starts at $40 a square foot and can go as high as $700.

“It’s all just labor,” she said.

On she moved to the basement, where detail painted on the glass is baked in and windows are sealed with a gooey mixture of plaster of Paris, whiting and lampblack.

Someone who evidently knew the building asked what the gallery was being used for.

“It’s now being used mostly for storage,” Judson said, almost apologetically. “We’re in the process of applying for some low-interest loans to fix the roof leaks. We’ve had some damage.”

The tour moved out the back door onto Thorne Street, where architect David Weaver met it to continue along a semicircle of old houses that surround Judson Studios the way workers’ dwellings might surround a rural cottage industry.

Several of the houses were built by members of the Judson family.

They show a common theme of zaniness that Weaver couldn’t help but comment on.

“I think this is a really ugly house, right,” he said, pointing out an arroyo stone wall under a French mansard roof in William Judson’s personal residence.

“One story is that he had students help him and it was kind of a laboratory for doing different things,” Weaver said.

Like the studio, it’s now an oddly enchanting remnant of the Craftsman spirit.