Since we've had a huge upsurge in traffic lately, and since many folks are writing to ask questions that boil down to the same thing - what, exactly is a bungalow? - I've decided to include a short definition. This is taken from Kenneth R. Trapp's The Arts & Crafts Movement in California: Living The Good Life:
The bungalow was the major American middle-class
housing innovation of those years, and the Golden State,
"Bungalow-land," was said to be its birthplace. Odes were written to
the California bungalow, characters in novels portrayed it as close to
Nirvana: "Mama and me are planning to go out to Pasadena and buy a
bungalow."
Although the prime years of bungalow promotion were
1905-15, the Los Angeles Examiner reported in May 1904 that every
street in Pasadena had a bungalow, and Los Angeles and Hollywood
abounded in the wide-roofed dwellings as well. The typical bungalow
that came to dominate in the greater Los Angeles area combined timber
construction and rustic siding or shingles with such mountain-camp
references as fieldstone foundations or walls, cobblestone chimneys and
piers - sometimes randomly interspersed with protruding clinker bricks - and, perhaps, log or pebble-dash accents.
Such "rustic simplicity," deemed the essential
bungalow trait by one writer on Southern California domesticity, was
reiterated inside. A masonry chimney breast or mixed-media surround
(cobblestones, brick, rock, or tile facings) often served as the focal
point of a wainscoted living room incorporating built-in benches and
bookcases to create a compact but imposing fireside inglenook. The
cavernous stone hearth of the Mount Lowe Alpine Tavern was illustrated
in a 1909 House and Garden article on modern fireplaces that captured
the old-fashioned home spirit of the colonial or preindustrial kitchen
and living hall. Also featured in the article were a floor-to-ceiling
rough clinker-brick model from the Los Angeles mail-order bungalow
builder Henry L. Wilson and a Craftsman-like affair of tile, wood
buttresses, and beams framing an overmantel mountain landscape. The
latter fireplace treatment was the work of Carl Enos Nash's company,
"artists as well as craftsmen," who favored scenic, matte-glazed Grueby
and Rookwood tiles depicting forest, desert, and pastoral motifs in
keeping with the bungalow's mission to maximize the charms of outdoor
life. The living-room hearth was the most important emblem of the
devoted though informal home life advocated by Charles Keeler
and numerous reformer-idealists associated with the Arts and Crafts
movement. Nash articulated this linkage between material environment
and spiritual state: "As we sit meditating, watching the leaping flames
and listening to the crackle of the fire, what can be more conducive to
perfect contentment than a well designed fireplace?"
In January 1913 an account by Charles Francis
Saunders in the West Coast magazine Sunset admirably distilled the
interior and exterior hallmarks of the Californian indoor-outdoor
house, along with the easygoing, wholesome way of life associated with
it. "When you see a cozy one or one-and-a-half storied dwelling, with
low-pitched roof and very wide eaves, lots of windows and an outside
chimney of cobble or clinker-brick half hidden by clinging vines -
that is a bungalow, whatever other houses may be."
My favorite crafts fair in the country will be held this coming weekend. On June 10 & 11, do not miss the 36th annual 