Overwhelmed by the complexity, struck by the simplicity

MINUTES AFTER taking leave of the late afternoon aggression of cars cramming the 110, an unfamiliar stillness settles on the landscape. You might wonder if you’ve momentarily lost your reflexes or your senses, here on Hillcrest Avenue in Pasadena.

Or maybe it’s not the street or the neighborhood at all, but the house just up ahead, with its curious out-of-time aspect, its suggestion of other worlds. Where, exactly? The Far East? The Eastern seaboard? A lakeside lodge in a Western mountain range?

I rounded into the graceful arc of the drive and parked under a long, wood and stone porte-cochere -- how romantic, a porte-cochere -- that cast an orderly row of rafter tail shadows onto the wide lawn.

A faint cry of a bird was all that broke the bucolic calm. Not even the doorbell sounded when I pressed a button buried into one of the dark piney-green shingles of the house.

What I experienced straightaway when I crossed through the art glass front door into the main hall of the Blacker House was the enveloping smell of the past, a pleasant, transporting woodiness that was at once fresh and ancient, suggesting the naturalness of the outdoors and a century of lives lived here in these capacious rooms.

Then came the overwhelm. Wood overtook me. Teak here, mahogany there, wood, wood everywhere. Floors, ceilings, furniture, walls. Never had I seen so much of it in one home, nor so much variety. Ceilings of Douglas fir, panels of Port Orford cedar, floors of maple and oak. Elaborately detailed, rounded and rubbed. Gleaming.

And after the overwhelm, the impulse that couldn’t be controlled: This is wood that must be touched. It was only remotely possible for me to imagine anyone going through the two floors of Harvey and Ellen Knell’s home without running a hand along the satiny banister or following the soft curve of a table’s edge, the back of a chair made by the amazing self-taught craftsman Jim Ipekjian.

But that’s not to diminish the pure visual aesthetic. I stood in one spot for just a few seconds studying the way the filtered sun illuminated a progression of walls straight ahead, and realized why the place didn’t feel monotonous or oppressive. Each wall reflected the light in a subtly different way, like a refined painting, giving the place a quiet, layered complexity.

The architecture of Charles and Henry Greene, who designed the Blacker House in the 1900s, in some ways transcends the category of Arts and Crafts into which it has been placed. Yes, the defining characteristics of the movement are there -- the rustic materials, the exposed beams, the sloping roofs with overhangs, the generous porches, the link to the outdoors, to list a few. But in their interiors, in particular, there is a poetic quality that is exalting and, as an aftereffect, a poignancy that is haunting. There is nothing that doesn’t bear the invisible imprint of the human hand or the ineffable sense of the human heart. The Greenes managed a seamless fusion of art with craft, and beyond doubt, you know they’re present in every detail.

Again I stood in one spot on the back lawn, looking upward with Ipekjian. It’s one of the places, he told me, where the intricacy of the house’s composition becomes suddenly apparent: There are so many different things going on. And yet once it’s put together, it simplifies itself. Everything becomes self-explanatory.

As a rule, if you stand back and look at the Blacker House, it’s just a big wood structure. You see the textures and color -- the wood and brick, the green of the shingles and the brown of the timbers. What you don’t always see is what’s been used and how it’s been used to create that big structure. You have to get close to it to understand its true dimensions and to fully appreciate the extraordinary talents of the Greene brothers.

Standing between the pergola and the porch, Ipekjian said, he began to see it. And, in an instant, I saw it too. Joinery used in the timber frames, beams lapped to support each other, panels let into the beams to create an attic space. It was all in the details. The Greenes looked at it this way: If the joinery showed, fine. If it showed beautifully, even better. I saw, in other words, what it is that justifies this house being called one of Charles and Henry Greene’s masterpieces, an international landmark of the Arts and Crafts movement: the exceptional craftsmanship, the touches of artistry, the Japanese temple motifs, particular pieces of furniture designed for a particular rooms, nature as an integral part of the design. In fact, if houses were spontaneous creations of nature, I imagine they might all look a lot like a Greene & Greene.

And if they were nature at her most creative, they might look exactly like the Blacker House, now returned by the Knells and their craftsmen to the wonderment it was conceived to be.

Barbara King is the editor of the Home section. She can be reached at barbara.king@latimes.com.