Homage to Greene and Greene : Exhibit: Work of the turn-of-the-century California architects, seminal in the Arts and Crafts movement, will be on permanent display at the Huntington Library.

Architects Charles and Henry Greene disdained the cookie-cutter houses and mass-produced furnishings of the machine age.

What earned the turn-of-the-century Pasadena artisans their worldwide reputation was their break with tradition and their functional yet elegant furniture that typified the “California” lifestyle.

Until now, the work of the Greenes could be glimpsed only rarely, during tours of old homes. On Tuesday, a sampling of Greene and Greene handiwork spanning 30 years carefully removed from private sitting rooms goes on permanent display at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino.

Putting together the collection--the Huntington’s first to showcase local artists--took substantial detective work.

Some of the furniture was salvaged from Greene and Greene homes demolished before their value was fully understood, said Ted Bosley, associate director of the Gamble House, a landmark Greene and Greene home in Pasadena that has been preserved as it looked in 1908.

About 60 Greene and Greenes--most in the Pasadena area--survive, he said.

One of the exhibit’s highlights is an exact reproduction of the dining room of the Henry M. Robinson house, built by the brothers in 1905. Bosley, who helped put the exhibit together, said Gamble House curators worked for months with drawings and measurements of the original room to set the scene correctly.

“In a domestic setting, you get a real feel for what Greene and Greene were trying to achieve,” Bosley said.

The Robinson house still stands in Pasadena but has been extensively remodeled. The current owners allowed the Greene and Greene experts to study the room and work from photographs of the original setting. Curators even steamed off two layers of dining room wallpaper to get samples of the original moss-green paint rolled on by the Greenes.

The result is a room that looks remarkably like the old photos--from the handcrafted wooden curtain-rod brackets to the cedar wall moldings. The dining room set--given to the Huntington Library in the 1950s--and the chandelier that goes with it are being reunited in the exhibit for the first time in more than half a century.

The stained-glass chandelier, a Greene and Greene design crafted by Emile Lange with Tiffany glass, is supported by massive wood beams and leather straps. It can be raised and lowered over the table with the help of two counterbalancing boxes filled with buckshot.

The chandelier and a dining room sideboard from the William R. Thorsen house, built by the Greenes in Berkeley in 1909, are the premier pieces in the exhibit, Bosley said. The sideboard features ebony detailing, fruitwood and mother-of-pearl inlaid decoration and the Oriental lines characteristic of Greene and Greene work.

A third major part of the exhibit is a staircase from the 1905 Arthur A. Libby house in Pasadena. When it was demolished in 1968, it was one of the last great houses of the so-called Millionaire’s Row on South Orange Grove Boulevard.

The oak staircase, ornamented only by small brass inlaid designs, was saved when the house was torn down, and had to be painstaking reconstructed for the exhibit.

Most of the furniture in the collection has been donated to the Gamble House or the Huntington Library over the past 25 years and has not been displayed before, Bosley said. Other pieces are on long-term loan from private collectors.

This is the first time the Greenes’ handiwork has been displayed in an exhibit that shows the complete evolution of their style from 1901 through the late 1930s, by which time the brothers were working independently. The exhibit will include architectural drawings and some photography and paintings done by the Greenes.

The exhibit is also unique at the Huntington, which since 1919 has been a repository of French and British art and which opened an American art gallery in 1984. But the Greene exhibit is the museum’s first to showcase the works of local artists.

“Charles and Henry Greene were the most important American architects in Southern California at the turn of the century,” Bosley said. “Their work was an inherently Californian expression of architecture, and they took the Arts and Crafts movement to its zenith.”