San Franicisco Chronicle

A Craftsman Consciousness -- A bungalow undergoes a revival with brick, clay pots and period color

Katherine Grace Endicott, Special to The Chronicle
Wednesday, May 18, 2005

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.

The bungalow's beautifully designed hardscape features, such as pergolas, trellises, gates, loggias, gazebos and garden benches, drew the homeowner beyond the porch and down into the garden. So did exquisite Craftsman lanterns and light fixtures in designs still so popular with homeowners today that you can purchase handmade varieties for several hundred dollars and knock-offs made in China for less than $30. For current bungalow owners, Duchscherer believes the most valuable improvement to the bungalow garden is the construction of hardscape features, true to the original bungalow concept, that connect the house to the garden.

When it came to planting the bungalow garden, the most influential designer for Californians, as for the rest of America and England, was Englishwoman Gertrude Jekyll, whose best-selling book "Colour in the Flower Garden" reflected nearly 30 years of plant design. Astonishingly, her plant combinations are still widely used today with all styles of homes. What she excelled at was the natural-looking border built up typically with a discerning use of grays, silvers, pinks and whites accented with blues and a touch here and there of yellow or red. In her prolific career she used hundreds of different plants, commenting, "There are no bad plants, only plants badly placed."

The Bay Area bungalow was typically swathed in plants, not only in natural-looking borders, but on trellises and pergolas covered with wisteria and clematis. Often the garden contained roses to provide cut flowers and a kitchen garden with herbs and citrus trees.

Three years ago, Duchscherer undertook the landscape remodeling of the large 1915 Craftsman bungalow of Debbie and Dennis Segers in Los Altos. Covering three city lots, the home came with towering deodara cedars and oaks. Duchscherer divided the large front garden into five smaller garden rooms by creating a series of low walls, using clinker bricks with river rock inserted, copying the design of the front porch. The low walls serve as benches as well as dividers. The individual garden "rooms" are then accented with Craftsman fences, gates and benches. The centerpiece is a fountain Duchscherer designed using a glazed clay pot. Water trickles out of the pot, cascading down a raised rock platform into a round brick pond.

Working with landscape designer Irving Tamura, Duchscherer created a harmonious blend of plants and landscaping features. On either end of the front garden, the tall trees anchor woodland garden rooms filled with pink and purple rhododendrons, ferns and a baby tear ground cover. These garden rooms lead into gardens filled with Mediterranean and native plants such as California poppies, willowy grasses, Pacific Coast iris, and New Zealand flax with Scotch moss used as a ground cover. In the middle of these four gardens, leading to the front porch, is the cottage garden using colors dear to Jekyll's style, with pink Sweet William, gray lamb's ear, white foxgloves, pink roses and blue lobelia with star creeper as a ground cover.

Elsewhere, there is a kitchen garden, a rose garden and two woodland gardens, one with a simple birdbath and the other with a pond and waterfall. True to the bungalow concept, porches on every side of the house allow the viewer to enjoy the gardens from a sheltered spot.

Debbie Segers spends an hour or two each day puttering about the garden, chatting with neighbors from her porch or the garden rooms at the front of the house.

The colors and style of the bungalow itself are carried into the garden (the house was renovated by John E. Matthams International Design, in Pacific Grove). Exposed roof rafters are painted that grayed-down green found in eucalyptus leaves which is often simply known as Craftsman green and used widely in bungalow homes.

The same shade is found in the wide variety of pots throughout the garden. Pottery was essential to the Craftsman lifestyle, with its emphasis on art used in everyday life. Rich beige tones in the river rock masonry are repeated in the flagstone walks. And the reddish brown hue on the trim is echoed in the clinker bricks and the central fountain's pot.

The Craftsman bungalow and its garden embodied an artistic sensibility particular to the Arts and Crafts Movement. Arthur and Lucia K. Mathews were leaders in what became known as the California Decorative Style. They created distinctive paintings, objects and furniture that forged the West Coast's take on the crafts movement. Their work, which can be seen at the Oakland Museum of California, reflects their philosophy that one's environment should be in total harmony and that people should surround themselves only with objects they consider beautiful.

The Craftsman bungalow and its garden bring that philosophy home.

Katherine Grace Endicott is an East Bay gardener. E-mail her at home@sfchronicle.com.