The armchair across the page provides elegant proof that there was more to the turn-of-the-century Arts and Crafts movement than Gustave Stickley. Stickley’s linear style is the one most people associate with American Arts and Crafts furniture. Yet even the most passionate Stickley collector might be happy to trade a dozen of his chairs for a single example like this. In the work of the brothers who made it we see the best possible proof that the movement was not a monolith but a collection of regional styles. Charles Sumner Greene and Henry Mather Greene of Pasadena designed houses, landscapes, and interiors in a uniquely Western idiom that took the best of the Crafts aesthetic and shaped it to the particular demands of California life.

The Greene brothers were personally and professionally close throughout their long lives. Trained in architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, they graduated in 1891, traveled to Pasadena two years later to see their parents, and never went back east. They set up a business and in the first few years of their partnership designed houses according to the conventions of the day. Several factors eventually nudged them forward: During a stopover on their cross-country trip they had been impressed by the Japanese exhibit at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and during Charles’s wedding trip to England in 1901 he seems to have come under the sway of the British Arts and Crafts designers William Morris, John Ruskin, M. H. Baillie Scott, and A. H. Mackmurdo. And in California, as the Greene and Greene scholar Randall Makinson notes, there was less of a design tradition to adhere to (or escape from). Starting around 1904, the brothers began to work in a style that was particularly their own.

The Oriental influence surfaced and can be seen in the mother-of-pearl inlays that ornament the splat of the armchair pictured here. For the rest of their careers the brothers would design with a sinuous, even sensuous, rounded line that derived in part from Art Nouveau. The greatest influence on their style, however, always came from closer to home. While respectful of the past, they were firmly rooted in the present and in the demands of designing for California. So the houses they created after about 1905—including the ones Makinson has called “the ultimate bungalows—had generous overhanging roofs to block the sun and wide-open porches to catch the breeze. Eventually the brothers would design more than 150 bungalows—substantial one-story homes for the substantial classes.

The Greenes didn’t design only houses, however. They regarded themselves as complete designers. Their works included not only houses but landscapes and interiors as well, right down to carpets, lighting fixtures, silverware, and linens.

They didn’t work fast. Adelaide Tichenor of Long Beach, an early