Live and Learn

First, it was weird to be alone at night in The House, with the low glow of carbon-filament bulbs, and Aunt Julia’s ghost cruising around. And then there are the 30,000 tourists parading through the front door each year to tour the National Historic Landmark in Pasadena--meaning no dishes in the sink, no holiday swags tacked to the doors, no walking in bare feet that deposit oil on the American white oak floors.

But for USC architecture students Bob Gdowski and Carol Chacon, the 1908 Gamble House feels like home, the way architects Greene and Greene had hoped it would. In August, the two fifth-year students began a yearlong stay via the annual USC Scholar-in-Residence Fellowship, sponsored by the Friends of the Gamble House.

Gdowski and Chacon live in the former servants’ quarters--with period furniture by master Gustav Stickley--tucked in a nook off the second-floor landing. Their bedrooms, bathroom and basement workshop are out of public sight (and so are the Keith Haring magnets stuck on their refrigerator).

The two students think of the place as a piece of art, a masterpiece of California bungalow style and the Arts and Crafts movement in America. The house was built for David and Mary Gamble, heirs of Procter & Gamble Co., whose framed pictures sit atop a living room bookcase. But Gdowski and Chacon don’t need a reminder to respect the house. They don’t use the fireplace. They don’t eat in the formal dining room or walk through the house with food and drinks.

The two students, who are longtime friends, stay rent free, paying only their private telephone bills. In exchange, they make sure the house is locked up at night and set up tables and chairs for special events. They turn away tourists who see the lights on at night and ask for a peek. One evening, two men sat down on the front porch settee to smoke cigars until Chacon asked them to leave.

“It really is so welcoming as a home,” says Chacon, 22, who wanders downstairs in her bathrobe at night and sinks into a living room chair. “It doesn’t feel like a museum.”

A Love of Light

Growing up in Los Angeles, Chacon painted, sculpted and studied photography. She thought she knew what light was--until she moved into the Gamble House.

She can’t get over the way the light blinks off the paneling in a golden glow. Or the way the architects thought to capture the sunshine in the morning through the leaded art-glass front doors. It’s not just the cathedral light. It’s the way the architects thought about the light and how the people in the house would think about the light. The light, she says, reflects an integrity that’s hard to find in subdivisions thrown up faster than the Thomas Guide can put them on the map.

You don’t get to feel the way the light changes with the hours and the seasons on tours through the house, with hundreds of people milling about. Sometimes, a docent will interrupt a tour and stop Gdowski, 23, when he walks through the front door. Are you lost? Can I help you? “Uh,” he will say, “I live here.”

He knows what the docents tell tourists: Don’t touch anything.

No touching anything, Gdowski thought when he first moved into what’s known around campus as The House. He felt as if he should move through the house with his hands up, as if he were in a robbery. That lasted a few days.

“The first week,” he says, “I’m just . . .” He hurls himself at a door and rubs his hands over the wood frame with relish.

Homey Feeling

He’s joking, of course. Gdowski is a cutup but solemn about his pursuits. At night, he will pop a hunk of dough into the bread maker because the smell of fresh bread in the house just seems right.

Gdowski grew up in the Midwest, steeped in the genius of Frank Lloyd Wright. But from a distance. Now he picks up on details of his craft every day. Look at the way the space in the living room was designed around the furniture. The way the corners of the front stairs come together.

“I’m amazed every time I walk through the house,” he says. “I can’t believe how beautifully put together this house is.”

But Chacon and Gdowski don’t have the house to themselves much. Public tours are offered Thursday through Sunday. Evening events are scheduled several nights a week. Every day, staff, docents or the grounds crew are around--and, rumor has it, Aunt Julia, the long-dead sister of Mary Gamble. But the two students can hole away in their dorm-sized bedrooms, with their own TVs. They can have overnight guests. And with a bit of planning, they had one small dinner party.

“I think it’s even better when people are in it,” says Gdowski, who had to break himself of the habit of leaving the newspaper on the kitchen table. “It brings life to the house. It’s kind of a religious experience when you’re alone, but when there are people in it, everything begins to breathe.”

The live-in scholars program began in 1967 through the USC School of Architecture, which preserves and runs the house, along with the city of Pasadena. That August, a USC architecture student was asked to go to the Gamble House and help move furniture.

First Scholar

The student chatted with the curator about how it might be good for someone to live in the house for security reasons. The curator agreed, and the student pitched the idea to the dean. The student, Ronald Arthur Altoon, became the house’s first scholar. He’s now a Los Angeles architect and president of the American Institute of Architects. He still remembers what it was like to be struck by the light in the house and the way the details of the house tie together.

USC’s program is unusual, said officials of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Some house museums hire live-in caretakers, who typically have extensive duties, such as maintenance. But the USC scholars are not meant to be caretakers. Instead, they are selected for the privilege of residency, says Ted Bosley, director of the Gamble House.

Even the live-in scholars who were not fans of Greene and Greene leave the residency program with a sense of the architects’ craftsmanship, Bosley says. The die-hard glass-and-steel modernists still swoon at the hand-rubbed wood in the house--the Burma teak panels, the mahogany pegs, the Honduras mahogany chairs.

“I see new things all the time, new details that I haven’t noticed before,” says Bosley, who has had an office in the house for eight years. “Houses like that reveal themselves slowly. Any place with that level of detail has always got something to teach.”

The 8,100-square-foot house--including two stories, an attic and basement--started out as a little winter place for the Gambles. At the time, the Arts and Crafts movement was stressing a back-to-handcraftsmanship approach, a construction that works with the natural environment. For this, the Gambles turned to young Pasadena architects, brothers Charles and Henry Greene, whose work was to influence modern architecture.

Influence of Greenes

Ninety years after Greene and Greene built the house, Gdowski is starting to photo document their work, taking pictures of every detail for himself. Someday, he says, he wouldn’t be surprised if a Greene and Greene influence crept into his work.

The architects’ integrity, says Chacon, will seep into her work in ways she cannot describe.

“The idea of the whole house being a total work of art,” she says, “where the concept of the design just doesn’t stop at the door, it doesn’t just stop at the joints.

“Architects nowadays just think the wrapping is where you stop. It wasn’t just a style. It was more a way of life. It just presented people with a new way of experiencing a home.”

Previous live-in scholars, including Altoon, still return to the house for fund-raisers and other events. Altoon remembers how he felt when he was packing up to leave after his year of residency. He wouldn’t be surprised, he says, if Gdowski and Chacon get the same feeling.

“At some point in time,” he says, “it will dawn on them that they will never live as well again.”

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An Enduring Style

You can’t mistake the look: the simple boxy bungalow with porches and verandas. Low, shingled roofs. Deep eaves. Built for the California environment. Known as the California Bungalow.

In some parts of Pasadena--the base of pioneering architects Greene and Greene--the bungalows look much the way they did when they were built in the early 1900s. Greene and Greene were influential architects of the bungalow style and America’s Arts and Crafts movement, which emphasized simple, natural designs. The Gamble House is the best-preserved example of their work, but more than 40 Greene and Greene homes still exist in Pasadena.

In 1966, the Gamble family deeded the house and property to the city of Pasadena in a joint agreement with USC. Public tours run Thursday through Sunday from noon to 3 p.m. at the house, 4 Westmoreland Place, Pasadena. Admission is $5 for adults, $4 for 65 and older and $3 for full-time students. Children under 12 are free. Information: (626) 793-3334.

On Friday through Sunday, Pasadena Heritage will sponsor its seventh annual Craftsman Weekend, featuring a tour of six Craftsman-era houses, including Gamble House. The event is the largest celebration of the Arts and Crafts movement in the West. Other events include gallery receptions, restoration workshops, antique exhibits and lectures. Information: (626) 441-6333.

Also, the Gamble House suggests a self-guided walking tour of the area that includes these properties:

* Cole House (1906), 2 Westmoreland Place. Architects: Greene and Greene.

* Ranney House (1907), 440 Arroyo Terrace. Architects: Greene and Greene.

* Willett House (1905), 424 Arroyo Terrace. Architects: Greene and Greene.

* Hawks House (1906), 408 Arroyo Terrace. Architects: Greene and Greene.

* Feynes House (1905), 470 W. Walnut St. Architect: Robert Farquhar.

* Ayers House (1913), 5 Westmoreland Place. Architect: Edwin Bergstrom.

* Jesse Hoyt Smith House (1911), 6 Westmoreland Place. Architects: Myron Hunt and Elmer Grey.