“Such a paradise as Pasadena”: The British(ish) History of the California Bungalow
Visitors to Pasadena, California may find themselves looking upon the Gamble House, appreciating the broad and sloping roof, overhanging eaves, exquisite brickwork, and beautifully hand-sculpted wooden rafters. The main door is composed of panes of Tiffany glasswork depicting gnarled oak trees commonly found in the surrounding area. Stepping inside, folks find custom-designed furniture, stained glass, intricate carpets, and expansive windows offering a beautiful view of lush trees and flowerbeds. Although elevated through exquisite craftsmanship, the Gamble House draws on the classic elements of the California bungalow. Designed in 1908 by sibling architects Charles and Henry Greenefor David and Mary Gamble (of the Procter & Gamble Company), the Gamble House remains an internationally recognized masterpiece of the American Arts and Crafts movement. Yet visitors may not fully appreciate the history connecting the Gamble House to England and the trans-Atlantic history of the Arts and Crafts movement to which the Gamble House belongs.
These linkages begin with the influence and evolution of the bungalow, now a commonly found architectural style in California. In the past three-hundred years, the term and meaning of the bungalow have traveled and evolved across time and space. Anthony D. King’s The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture traces the bungalow as a term and idea, providing a global cultural history tied to industrialization, imperialism, and urbanization at a global scale. King’s research illustrates how the influence of the bungalow on the Greenes connects California architecture to Britain’s imperial history. The bungalow, as a term and a distinctive dwelling form, originated in India. Derived from the Hindi or Mahrati word Bangla—meaning “of or belonging to Bengal”—the earliest use of the term described quickly built shelters made from the materials at hand by local peasants.
With the expansion of East India Company rule in the 1760s and 1770s, Indian and English soldiers were housed in a rapidly evolving version of the bungalow. By the end of the 18th century, the bungalow was understood to be a single-story dwelling generally raised on a base of brick with a large room at the center, covered by one general thatch roof that comes low at each side, with verandahs on each end. By this point only Europeans in India were living in this style of dwelling, and the term bungalow was used indiscriminately to describe any small European house in India.
The growth of industry in the later 19th century furthered the bungalow’s global spread, as the British adopted its design in various parts of the empire. This adoption was often directly linked to industrialization as bungalows housed those across the empire engaged in material extraction from its colonies, or those building further infrastructure to support that extraction. For example, the British established bungalows—structures they associated with the tropics— for house managers of British plantations in Malayasia as well as British railway engineers in West Africa. King’s work provides further insight into this dynamic, showing how both the term and its evolving structure are part of an imperial history of expansion and industrial production, as industry relied upon those extracted materials.
Despite these ties to industry, the bungalow became a central part of a design movement which sought to critique industrialization. The British Arts and Crafts movement emerged in late Victorian England as a response to anxieties about industrialization and industrialized labor, instead emphasizing hand-crafted objects and workmanship. The writings of A. W. N. Pugin (1812-1852) and John Rushin (1819-1900) influenced the movement’s figurehead William Morris (1834-1896), who sought to bring the arts into home design with an emphasis on nature and simplicity of form. Morris pushed for a return to manufacture based on small-scale workshops and craft-based production. The movement gained momentum in the 1870s and was influenced by Morris’ socialist turn. As the idea of the bungalow circulated globally over time, it provided an answer to concerns about rapid industrialized housing and developed into the quintessential housing structure that kept one “close to nature.” The design of the bungalow rejected a rapidly industrializing world.
The Arts and Crafts movement arrived in the U.S. in the 1870s via household art from Britain. Middle-class American women, who were looking to demonstrate their good taste, bought these functional and beautiful household objects to improve their homes. While magazines and expositions marketed decorative needlework and silver overlay pottery to women in the U.S. throughout the latter half of the century, the architecture of the Arts and Crafts movement did not gain prominence until the turn of the 20th century. Magazines, like House Beautiful, The Ladies Home Journal, and The Craftsman, were central to spreading Arts and Crafts Architecture across the U.S. Both the U.S. and the British Arts and Crafts movements valued hand-crafted objects, but the American movement focused on arts and crafts as a commercial product, forgoing the socialist critique of industrialization and capitalism that was central to the British Arts and Crafts movement.
The Gamble House is a well-known architectural masterpiece of the American Arts and Crafts movement. The Gamble family was a typical example of the wealthy midwestern family looking to winter in California. David and Mary Gamble were originally from Ohio and they wintered in Pasadena regularly, staying at the Hotel Raymond. When they decided to build their own home in 1907, they hired Charles and Henry Greene as their architects. The Greenes learned about Arts and Crafts architecture through exhibitions, magazines, and their own travels. Charles Greene made a trip to England with Alice Gordon White, his English wife, for their honeymoon. The Brothers also visited the 1893 Columbian Exhibition in Chicago and the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exhibition in Saint Louis. Like the women of the 1870s, these two architects developed their own style by incorporating elements of the visual discourse they were exposed to. At these fairs, they encountered Japanese traditional architecture for the first time—which they would incorporate into the Gamble House—and saw handcrafted household objects elevated to arts.
The homes the Greenes designed in California reflected their understanding of their environment, the people they were serving, and the Greenes’ engagement with a global Arts and Crafts movement. Architects used the bungalow to connect residents to the natural world by using minimally processed materials and highlighting connections between the interior of the home and the environment around it. The typical California bungalow prominently featured materials like stone and regional wood. They became more refined and “artistic” as people started to reside in the homes year round. They were characterized by low rooflines, overhanging eaves, porches, and large windows which allowed for a connection between the bungalow’s interior and the outdoors. The Greene brothers were central to defining the form of the California bungalow and the Gamble House is the form at its most extravagant.
In the 1870s, architects introduced the bungalow in England. It was associated with a leisure or holiday house for the growing middle class. In fact, the first English bungalows were built on the seafront in Westgate and Birchington. These structures were tied to beliefs about health, sanitation, and recreation. Though architects began designing bungalows in Britain, these bungalows were not associated with the British Arts and Crafts movement. Instead, the British movement embraced the cottage. In the American Arts and Crafts movement, however, architects chose to adopt the bungalow, as they lacked the “cottage tradition” Britain could claim. If the English Cottage was the quintessential Arts and Crafts home in England, the California bungalow became its American counterpart. It is in America that the bungalow found extreme popularity. Later, in the 1910s, the bungalow was popularized in Britain with a clear American, dare we say Californian, influence.
In May 1912, the British publication Building News and Engineering Journal praised the bungalow and its popularity in the United States, specifically Pasadena, writing “the delights of the Bungalow, as it exists in the favoured spots in the United States, and notably in such a paradise as Pasadena, are absolutely undreamt of. To those who love a simple life, in which comfort obtains without the chains of ceremony and in which empty pretensions find nothing to feed upon, there is no dwelling so absolutely congenial and restful as a well-planned, one-storey, and roomy bungalow.” This was followed by a call for more bungalows in England to mirror their popularity in the United States. By the 1920s, the bungalow boomed on both sides of the Atlantic, though these were a far cry from the first bungalow structures in colonial India
While the connection between the Gamble House and the bungalow may seem clear–the building’s overhanging eaves, the uses of regional and tropical woods, stonework integrated throughout– the Greenes themselves did not intend to call their buildings bungalows. Still, Charles Greene said in a 1908 issue of The Western Architect, “There is a suggestiveness in the word bungalow that makes it interesting. Just now it is a popular catch word—all the more because few of us have seen a real one. There is play for the imagination. We have never called our houses bungalows, but we cannot shake off the appellation however removed it may be from a semblance of anything Anglo-Indian.” The Greenes, through the Gamble House, brought together the influence of the bungalow—with its unshakable imperial history—and the Arts and Crafts movement to create an internationally recognized architectural masterpiece. So, if you find yourself visiting the Gamble House or walking amongst the famous California bungalows while in Pasadena for the 2026 NACBS annual meeting, we hope you recognize the architectural style’s British(ish) history and global interconnections.
Sophia Warner is a PhD student at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign specializing in urban environment and US Empire in the Pacific.
Priyanka Zylstra is a PhD Candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign specializing in modern British history, South Asian diasporas, and British Empire.
The views and opinions expressed in this post are solely those of the original author/s and do not necessarily represent the views of the North American Conference on British Studies.
