A genteel face-lift

Outside the Gamble House in Pasadena, it’s a blindingly bright morning. A few people have sought shade on a bench under a tree while waiting for the first tours of the day. The traffic on Orange Grove Boulevard is a steady baritone beneath the trills of a bird sitting alone on a blossoming cherry branch.

A glance at the landmark residence itself, however, reveals a sharply different level of activity. Although still open to the public -- it receives 30,000 visitors a year -- the structure is surrounded by lattice scaffolding on which workers stand, sit or stride. Like many a Southland home, the Gamble House is in the midst of a renovation, which began in October and is scheduled to be done in July. The budget is a formidable $3.5 million.

The project is a discreet, gentle affair, though. Behind the stained-glass doors, the rooms are dim and quiet. Work crews use toothpicks and the thinnest brushes in their belts. So delicate is the task, it resembles the painstaking restoration of Renaissance paintings. It’s a process that is at once scientific, artistic and philosophical.

The origins of the Gamble House date to 1907, when the heirs to the Proctor & Gamble fortune, David Berry Gamble and his wife, Mary Huggins Gamble, commissioned brothers Charles and Henry Greene to design a house on Westmoreland Place in Pasadena. At the time, the two architects already had a thriving business, with an established reputation for their Arts and Crafts design.

By February 1908, Greene & Greene had completed the drawings, and they broke ground in March. What would become the Gamble winter home was completed 10 months later.

As a reaction to the industrial revolution and mechanized production, the Arts and Crafts movement emphasized craftsmanship, unified design and the use of natural materials. All were ideals embraced by the two Greene brothers.

The house was not only significant for its architecture, it was a total and unified work of art -- a Gesamtkunstwerk. Every detail was designed, every bit of furniture unique. “It was a fully integrated aesthetic,” says Edward Bosley, the director of the house.

Declared a National Historic Landmark in 1978, the house was inspired by Japanese design and has a rich interior of Burmese teak, Honduras mahogany, walnut, cedar, ebony and oak.

During the day, the living room appears muted, but toward dusk, slanted sunshine illuminates the different colors of the wood. A glass butterfly hangs from the canopy of a table lamp. Stained-glass lights suspended from the ceiling feature the family crest, a crane. In a corner, the family motto is inlaid on a letter box: “Vix ea nostra voco” (I scarcely call these things our own).

Keeping with another of the philosophical ideas of the Arts and Crafts movement -- collaboration with artisans -- the Greenes left some artistic decisions to the craftsmen they employed. Their idea for the carpet, for example, was a small watercolor sketch from which the weaver extrapolated the design.

From the master bedroom furniture (inlaid with semiprecious stones, ebony and turquoise) to the sugar pine countertops and maple drawers in the kitchen, “we’ve got practically every stick of [original] furniture,” Bosley says, adding that one reason the interior has remained in such good shape is that the house was undisturbed by small children or pets. (The Gamble children were mostly away at boarding school in the winter, and the family kept only a few birds -- in the attic.)

“It is unquestionably one of the most important buildings in America, and being constructed in wood, it’s relatively fragile,” says Peyton Hall, principal of the Historic Resources Group, which is working on the renovation. Conservators approached the task with care, he says, inspired by the medical dictum “First, do no harm.”

Architectural conservator John Griswold “is the doctor who looks at the individual organs,” says Hall. His own job? “Diagnose the source, not just the symptoms.”

Like most nearing their 90th birthday, the Gamble by 1997 had frayed a little around the edges. Beams were splitting and rafters were rotting. Bosley asked a group of architects and conservators to develop a plan for the complex restoration, which is being paid for with private contributions, federal and state funds, and grants from the Ahmanson Foundation, the Ayrshire Foundation, the Ralph M. Parsons Foundation, the Norton Family Foundation and the Getty Grant Program.

The shutters -- the front line of the house -- were the most damaged of the architectural components. They had been repaired so many times, it was hard to determine their original look. By chance, staff found 11 pristine, unused examples in the basement that served as models for restoration of the others.

Staffers also gathered samples of the exterior shakes, which were sent to a project scientist in Massachusetts, who, using electron microscopes, established 13 categories of deterioration. With that, says Hall, “we had a window on the past, to look at previous [treatments] and their effects.”

With those possibilities, however, came a philosophical question: Should conservators turn the clock back to 1909, or 1929, or leave undisturbed the evidence of decades of routine wear and tear? A decision was made against radical surgery.

The structure “has the grace and patina of age, like a great work of art,” Hall says.

And so, rather than strip the faded dirty-Dijon-colored outdoor paint, conservators simply coated it with a layer of protectant, deepening the hue and giving it a closer resemblance to the green it once was.

Although the lead-based paint that has covered the house since the 1930s has had the unexpected and beneficial side effect of preserving many of the shakes, “almost like a fossil,” Griswold says, rot in the rafters was the consequence of a restoration job in the 1980s. (The epoxy used to glue cracks in the beams prevented water from evaporating or running off.) So, using dental picks, workers cleaned rot from each rafter before filling it with a more advanced epoxy containing silicon additives, allowing it to “breathe.”

With Griswold conducting seminars on the scaffolding (telling workers to “add a pinch more raw umber pigment”), the conservation became an artisanal project in the spirit of the original design, as crews sculpted and painted.

“We’re really treating the house as if it was a museum object,” Griswold says. “We were able to follow a methodology we use in museum conservation labs, and the house is really starting to look more correct, instead of looking like a ‘remodel.’ ”

Although understanding the physical evidence -- and looking carefully at the chemistry -- is important, “science can only take us so far,” Griswold says. “Ultimately, it’s the artists’ and the makers’ intent we have to understand and respect.”

Like the restoration of paintings or antiquities, one important part of the work is leaving clues -- traces of the new work for future researchers -- and making sure that every detail can be reversed. With that in mind, one corner window onto the downstairs terrace will be left untouched.

“The methods and materials, the scientific investigation of the wood and its finishing should benefit other people,” Hall says. “This is very useful and should be available to the neighbors. In Pasadena alone, there are many Greene & Greene houses, and we want people to know what we’re doing and how we’re doing it.”

For those interested, there is already a 600-page report, funded in part by two donations from the Getty Grant Program.

Because of the iconic status of the house, “a lot of people have their eyes on this project,” says Tim Whalen, director of the Getty Conservation Institute. “It’s a complicated conservation project. It can serve as a model for the entire field.”

For Dana Bates, though, it’s simply home.

One of the two architecture students that USC each year awards the privilege of living in the Gamble House, 24-year-old Bates occupies the maids’ quarters on the second floor. The public tours don’t bother her much, and there are only a few inconveniences: No candles, and friends who smoke have to do so elsewhere.

And the upsides are many. Living inside such a great work is inspirational, Bates says. And it has more privacy than a dorm.

Best of all: “It’s so great to open the door when your friends come over and say, ‘Welcome to my house.’ ”