Katherine Endicott, an avid gardener and Arts & Crafts aficionado, wrote the following for the San Francisco Chronicle; the full article is available on their site. The article includes some great pictures by Chronicle photographer Kat Wade.

Around the turn of the 20th century, roughly 1890 to 1930, a mania for bungalows obsessed Californians. And for good reason. The predominantly small bungalow, some costing as little as $900, offered the middle class a home designed around both simplicity and artistry. Even better for Californians, a bungalow provided a way to live close to nature. As Paul Duchscherer, a San Francisco designer who has written and lectured extensively on bungalows, puts it, "Connecting the architecture to the garden was part of the bungalow sales pitch."

Over four decades, the styles of locally built bungalows varied dramatically from Mission Revival to English Tudor. But the two styles most closely identified with the term bungalow in the Bay Area are the shingled Craftsman bungalow and the stucco California bungalow. Both styles featured front porches as a way of linking the outdoors with indoors. The master designer of this period was Gustav Stickley, whose magazine The Craftsman (1901-1916) proselytized for the Arts and Crafts philosophy. Stickley's house designs emphasized the link between the bungalow and the garden.