Gamble House

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The Gamble House (constructed 1908 - 1909) is a National Historic Landmark and tourist attraction in Pasadena, California designed by the architect brothers Greene and Greene, Charles Sumner Greene and Henry Mather Greene, for David B. Gamble of the Procter & Gamble company.

Built as a retirement residence, the three-story Gamble House is a residential ark commonly described as America's Arts and Crafts masterpiece, whose style shows influence from traditional Japanese aesthetics and a certain California spaciousness born of cheap land and a permissive climate. Arts-and-Crafts architecture was all about superb materials, excruciating attention to detail, aesthetic harmony, and brilliant craftsmanship.

Image:GambleHouse-2005.jpg

Every room in the Gamble House was assembled in multiple kinds of wood, wood that looks (in Charles Moore's phrase) lovingly rubbed. The teak and maple and oak and cedar and mahogany surfaces are placed in rhythmic sequences that bring out their contrasts of color, tone and grain, no peg or air vent or bracket or knob singing off key. Inlay in the custom furniture matches inlay in the mantlepieces. The joinery on the main staircase is exposed like an interlocking puzzle. Two of the big wooden panels along the solid wall are actually secret doors that lead to two separate secret passages. The Greenes used local contractors who had worked together for them on Orange Grove Avenue (Millionaire's Row) in Pasadena on a dozen previous homes, an experienced team of contractors playing together like musicians.

The sensuous woods, the generously low and horizontal room shapes, and the quality of natural light that filters through the art glass exterior windows, coexist with a relatively traditional plan, in which most rooms are regularly shaped and organized around a central hall. Although the house is not as spatially adventurous as the contemporary works of Frank Lloyd Wright or even of the earlier New England "Shingle Style," its mood is casual and its symmetries tend to be localized - i.e. symmetrically organized spaces and forms in asymmetrical relationships to one another. Although there is no variation in ceiling height, and few territorial nooks and crannies, the forms and scales of the spaces are constantly shifting, especially as one moves from the interior of the house to its semienclosed porches and its free-form terrace. The best room may be the billiard room, occupying the entire third story, an afterthought built to make the house look better from the street. The Greenes had to talk David Gamble into it. He hated pool.

The house was seen as the residence of Doctor Emmett L. Brown in the Back To The Future films.

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