The Greene Brothers: Icons of California Architecture and Design

By Julie Jaskol | December 15, 2025

Charles Sumner Greene (1868-1957) was initially disappointed when his father arranged an unpaid internship for him with an architect. He’d wanted to be an artist, but his father wasn’t having it.

He had just graduated from Manual Training School, a progressive high school that trained young men in practical technical skills to prepare them for successful careers. While his younger brother, Henry Mather Greene (1870-1954), finished out his last year at Manual, Charles labored without inspiration in the office of St. Louis architect Alfred F. Rosenheim. When business was slow, he painted watercolors of steamboats on the Ohio River.

Dr. Thomas Greene had been nudging his sons toward architecture since they were small. It ran in the family. His grandfather was an architect, as was his father and some cousins. Once Henry completed his studies at Manual, Dr. Greene sent his boys to MIT in Boston to study architecture in earnest.

The boys entered MIT in the fall of 1888, and enjoyed busy school and social lives, with their father urging them to cultivate social contacts that could serve them well in the future. Charles was a middling student, Henry more accomplished. Their mother, Lelia, herself an artist, admonished Charles in a letter: “Ideal and Art are very fascinating… but it is very necessary for someone to work for the means and substance to keep the pot boiling and get the where-with-all to indulge such Luxuries.”

After graduation, the boys joined firms in Boston, gaining varied professional experience. Meanwhile, Dr. Greene suffered financial setbacks and Lelia developed asthma, prompting them to move from St. Louis to Pasadena in 1892. A year later, Charles and Henry decided to join them – but first, on the way, they stopped at the World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago.

Enormously influential in the future of American cities, the Exhibition featured architecture from all over the world, including wooden Japanese temples and thatch huts from Malaysia featuring open-air sleeping areas. This visit, and a later trip Charles made to the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition in 1904, helped deepen the Greenes’ interest in Asian art and architecture.

In Pasadena, the Greene brothers opened their own firm in 1894, building relatively modest homes at first and then gradually attracting wealthier clients and larger commissions. The houses they built were eclectic, reflecting the predominant styles of the day. Not until 1898, when they built a house for William B. Tompkins (since demolished), did they begin to design in the Arts & Crafts aesthetic.

Henry married Emeline Dart in 1989. A few months later Charles became engaged to Alice Gordon White. Charles and Alice wed in 1901 and spent a four-month honeymoon in Alice’s native England, where they were exposed to the work of William Morris and Charles Rennie Mackintosh of the English Arts & Crafts movement. When they returned to Pasadena, Greene & Greene began building the work for which they would be best known.

Amid an increasing number of commissions throughout the city Charles designed a home for his growing family along the Arroyo Seco in northwest Pasadena, in a neighborhood then known as the Park Place Tract. Nearby, he built a commission for James Culbertson, then a house for his sisters-in-law, followed by the Duncan-Irwin House, and others. The neighborhood became known as “Little Switzerland,” for its peaked roofs, eaves, shingles, and stone and half-timbered walls. The homes were connected by brick sidewalks and sheltered by mature oaks along the edge of the Arroyo.

By 1903, Charles emerged as the firm’s designer; Henry managed the business. They branched out into furniture design, the better to create a unified look and feel for their bungalows. In 1904, they began a longtime collaboration with another set of brothers, John and Peter Hall, skilled craftsmen who would help them make their ambitious, meticulous designs a reality.

Over the next decade or so, Greene & Greene would build their most prominent work, including the Blacker House and Gamble House in Pasadena, the Pratt House in Ojai, the Thorsen House in Berkeley, and the Fleischhaker Estate in Woodside, California, all of which are now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

They achieved perhaps the pinnacle of their career with the Gamble House in 1908, in which client, craftsmen, and designer came together in a fully realized expression of the Greenes’ unique vision. Open to the public and maintained in pristine condition with its custom-made furnishings intact, it is an acknowledged masterpiece.

By 1916, increasingly weary of working with clients and eager to express his artistry in other ways, Charles moved his family to Carmel-by-the Sea in Northern California. He wrote, designed furniture, and studied music, culture, and philosophy. He and Alice made their home the center of a lively group of like-minded artists, hosting musicales that often featured their daughter Anne on the piano.

In 1922, the firm of Greene & Greene closed its doors. Henry, practicing under his own name, continued to accept commissions and increasingly focused on landscape design. The brothers remained close despite the geographic distance between them.

The world moved on from Arts & Crafts design in the 1930s, and many of the Greenes’ bungalows suffered demolition or alteration as a new modernism took hold in Southern California. It wasn’t until after the war that another generation of architects expressed renewed appreciation for Greene & Greene, with books and magazine articles highlighting the work of the firm. In 1948 the Southern California Chapter of the American Institute of Architects presented them with a Certificate of Merit. In 1950, articles about their work appeared in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and the journal of the American Institute of Architects. In 1952 the AIA awarded them a Special Citation that described them as “formulators of a new and native architecture,” whose work made “California synonymous with simpler, freer, and more abundant living.”

Henry died in 1954 at age 84 in a Pasadena rest home, after living with his son for many years. Charles died in Carmel in 1957 at 89. They lived long, creative lives surrounded by loved ones, creating environments in which families could thrive.