Bleak Bungalow Is Restored to Former Glory
Built for a lumber baron, it was fit for a lord. The Blacker House of Pasadena has been called an “ultimate California bungalow” and is considered a masterpiece of the Arts and Crafts movement.
On Saturday, when this landmark was unveiled to architecture lovers, there was nothing in its artful restoration to suggest it had ever endured the now-legendary caper that preservationists dubbed “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”
Once again, a glowing stained-glass lantern illuminates the burnished teak hallway and the staircase of interlocking wood whose joinery was inspired by the harmonious construction of Buddhist temples. The harvest-toned panes of the heavy front door have been painstakingly re-created.
In the living room, shimmering gold leaf lotuses bloom on the wall against lily pads whose stems and leaves ripple up to the ceiling.
A crowd of people who paid a $30 admission fee waited patiently outside, drawn by a common “lust for design,” said Susan Obler, 60, a Whittier higher education consultant.
“I love the Craftsman era,” said her friend, Sandy Hampton, who made the pilgrimage from Long Beach. “Coming to these [open houses] is awe-inspiring. It’s an emotional event.”
It’s not hard to see why preservationists flipped out when Texas cattleman Barton English bought the place for $1.2 million in 1985 and stripped it of valuable stained-glass windows and four dozen treasured light fixtures.
Some lamps fetched $100,000 each, and a chandelier was valued at a half-million dollars.
To architectural historians, it was as if Barton had pillaged a church. They called him “Black Bart” and described his culling as rape or amputation.
“It’s sad that someone would strip a landmark, even if the fixtures were worth more than the house,” said Shirley Curren, a Pasadena real estate agent who was a member of the city’s Cultural Heritage Commission at the time. “People were just shocked. They couldn’t believe it.”
The indignation spurred the passage of an ordinance making it more difficult to remove original fixtures from buildings, such as the Blacker House, that were designed by revered Craftsman architects Charles and Henry Greene.
The measure was insufficient to spare the 1907 house commissioned by Michigan lumber magnate Robert R. Blacker when he retired to Pasadena during its belle epoque as an address for the rich and famous.
But Harvey and Ellen Knell, two residents of the area who had long coveted the house, were finally able to buy it in 1994. Since then, they have devoted themselves to its loving restoration and have made it their home.
The restoration was aided by a team of contemporary artisans and scholars and by new techniques for removing toxic paint and restoring wood without stripping it.
For many who came to view its rebirth, the house is a symbol of California treasures that are imperiled by the onslaught of freeways and shopping malls.
Sandy Hampton, a Long Beach corporate trainer, remembers the Craftsman-style houses in her neighborhood that were uprooted for highway entrance ramps. There is a Greene & Greene home on the waterfront in Long Beach, but its interior has been “totally ruined,” she said.
“Someone modernized it and built a high-rise next door, and now they can’t even sell [it]. It’s tragic,” she said. “They talk about people coming to California to reinvent themselves. That’s what they do with the architecture.
“They don’t see a beautiful house, they see a potential strip mall or parking lot,” she said.
Obler still recalls when many of San Diego’s Craftsman-era bungalows were torn from their lots during highway construction in the 1960s. In one of the most curious acts of accidental preservation ever, the homes were hoisted onto lorries, trucked down to Tijuana and set up on lots in Baja California.
The Arts and Crafts movement was a backlash against the excesses of the Victorian era, a time when homes seemed to sag under the burden of lace doilies, compulsive bric-a-brac, and rococo sensibilities.
Craftsman artisans harkened back to simple forms and materials, with a deliberately hand-crafted, organic look that turned away from the mass production of the Industrial Revolution. Its architects let local climate, light and landscapes inform the design of their homes.
Its images drew heavily on inspiration from nature and the Middle Ages. In Los Angeles, Batchelder’s signature tile designs incorporated everything from Mayan temples to Moorish casbahs.
The rebellion against unnecessary ornamentation was epitomized by the clean-lined furniture of Gustav Stickley, whose Mission-style beds, tables and chairs--many on display at the Blacker House--evoke the unadorned utilitarianism of Shaker craftsmanship.
The Craftsman movement did not survive into the edgy urbanism of the Jazz Age.
When Frank Lloyd Wright brought Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler to work in Hollywood in the 1920s, upscale clients quickly flocked to the new modernists.
But for many in California, Craftsman design will never go out of style.
Saturday, Estella Inman, a fifth-grade teacher in Pasadena, described why the principles that made the style popular still resonate.
“I love the simplicity of the homes, the yards and gardens and ponds,” said Inman, who takes her class every year to visit another Greene & Greene jewel in Pasadena, the Gamble House.
In an age of tract housing and freeways, “It’s important for them to know what quality is,” she said.
