2 Lucky Students Live in Gamble House

When two USC students make the move from frat house to Gamble House, a few lifestyle adjustments are inevitable.

Since Arnold Swanborn, 24, and James Lord, 23, took up residence in the venerable house last August, they have:

* Dodged some of the 190 volunteer docents who each year lead 30,000 tourists through the home;

* Been startled by people peering in the ground-level windows of the house’s basement studio workroom;

* Caught someone filching fish from the back-yard pond last Christmas.

Still, there are undeniable benefits to living at Pasadena’s most historically prestigious address as fellows of the Friends of the Gamble House Scholar-in-Residence program.

A kindly housekeeper. The chance to rub shoulders with noted architects who come to pay homage to the structure. And more or less free run of the Gamble House itself, constructed in 1908 by Charles Sumner Greene and Henry Mather Greene, and acclaimed as the most outstanding example of the turn-of-the-century Arts and Crafts movement in America.

Swanborn and Lord, both of whom lived in the Alpha Rho Chi architects’ fraternity house at USC before the move, now have a wing to themselves.

Their wood-paneled bedrooms, originally maids’ quarters, are furnished less grandly than the house’s public rooms, which feature exquisitely detailed Greene-and-Greene-designed furniture of special hardwoods sometimes inlaid with semiprecious stones.

Each student’s room includes a bed, dresser and curio cabinet, as well as a desk designed by Gustav Stickley, whose Mission-style furniture was barer and simpler than that created by the Greenes.

They work in the basement studio, a large room with white bulletin boards, a stone wall and fluorescent lighting. They’ve put their own stamp on the room with objets quite at odds with the Gamble House aesthetic: Thelma the papier-mache parrot, Swanborn’s Snoopy collection and Lord’s Matisse and Mondrian prints.

Randell Makinson, curator and director of Gamble House, said there have been 42 students-in-residence since the program began in 1967. Two fifth-year USC School of Architecture students--selected each year--are “screened by the faculty. Then our interviews are very intensively into character and responsibility,” he said.

Only one of the student tenants has ever presented any problems and decided to leave “by mutual agreement,” Makinson said.

“Over the years, there’s been an extraordinary amount of good judgment. There are no beer parties--it’s not like a fraternity house,” Makinson said.

Lord said Makinson, who is also a professor of architecture at USC, has “been like a father to us.”

“He’d like us to cook in the kitchen,” Swanborn added, “so that visitors will smell toast popping out of the toaster. We take our meals there, even during tours, and do the dishes later. But cooking? . . . It depends on which docent is around.”

The two student architects said they especially admire the home’s natural ventilation system and the indoor-outdoor feeling created by interior stained glass windows and the house’s open sleeping porches.

But though they both find the house “very beautiful,” there’s little else in Gamble House architecture that Swanborn or Lord finds exciting. They appreciate that it was revolutionary in its day, but their own tastes run to the modern.

The imposing Craftsman-style home, built for Procter & Gamble heir David Gamble and his wife, Mary, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1978.

“It’s a museum!” Lord’s mother said when she came to visit. No, her son replied. “This is our home.”