Docent with an Eye for Details Explores Gamble House in Book

For Gamble House docent Jeanette Thomas, the 81-year-old Craftsman home is more than an artful creation of hand-sanded wood, Tiffany glass, inlaid tiles and pressed brick.

“It borders on the mystical, the feeling I have for the house, and I’m not a mystic,” said Thomas, 68, a retired high school and college teacher.

To explain her feelings, Thomas began writing a book illustrating the major design themes she noticed in the house while leading nearly 1,000 tours.

Eight years later, “Images of The Gamble House” is prominently displayed in the Gamble House bookstore. Copies are also on sale in bookstores in San Francisco and Santa Monica.

Although other volumes deal with the work of architects Charles and Henry Greene and the house itself, Thomas’ book is the first to concentrate solely on the Pasadena home’s details. It is also the first published by the Gamble House program and USC, which, along with the city of Pasadena, maintains the home at 4 Westmoreland Place.

“I think it grew out of my tours,” Thomas said of her book. “There were things I couldn’t get people to look at, so I wrote a book.”

Those things include small details such as the abalone inlay on a hanging lamp, an Asian design used in a window frame and a pattern of three shapes found carved in a baseboard and repeated in structural posts.

Using 100 photographs taken by her son, Theodore Thomas, and his wife, Kuniko Okubo, Thomas’ book explores those details, which she classifies into eight major themes. Thomas said these architectural motifs bring a serenity to the Gamble House. Even after guiding tours through the home for 12 years, she still makes new discoveries, she said.

“It’s as though the house has a life of its own or has secrets it doesn’t reveal all at once,” she said. “I guess, in its own way, I’d compare it to a Gothic cathedral.”

Built in 1908, the 8,100-square-foot home was designed by architects Greene and Greene for the family of David Gamble, a Procter and Gamble Co. heir. It is a National Historic Landmark and internationally recognized as an example of the turn-of-the-century Arts and Crafts Movement.

That movement rejected Victorian fussiness and the popular fascination with mass-produced items to concentrate on building unique handcrafted homes and furnishings that were integrated with nature. Japanese design elements such as strong horizontal lines, asymmetry, unpainted wood, limited ornamentation and natural, subdued colors were also incorporated.

The Gamble House was thus distinctly different from Pasadena’s earlier mansions that imitated classical, European styles. It was also expensive, with its 17 varieties of wood, Tiffany glass, Grueby tiles, clinker brick and copper accessories, all made and assembled by hand.

The expense of building Greene and Greene homes meant that by 1916, no further major work came their way, Thomas said. Only about 90 Greene and Greene homes remain in Southern California, but Thomas believes most lack the design refinements and details of the Gamble House.

“It’s the details that make the house a work of art,” she said.