Greene and Greene

Greene & Greene are widely recognized for their development of a distinctively coordinated architectural and decorative style that defined the Arts and Crafts movement in California. Born in Cincinnati in 1868 and 1871, Charles Sumner Greene and Henry Mather Greene spent their teenage years in St. Louis where they attended Calvin Woodward’s Manual Training School of Washington University and studied woodworking, metalworking and tool-making. Graduates of the architectural program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, they held apprenticeships at architectural firms in Boston before joining their parents out in California where they opened their own architectural practice in Pasadena in 1894. Their design philosophy developed as Charles became interested in the English Arts and Crafts Movement while on honeymoon in Europe and both brothers attended the World’s Columbian Exposition where they admired Japanese architecture. The Greene & Greene office was at its peak in the first decade of the twentieth century during which time they completed around 150 projects with a focus on residential design. They earned a reputation for work that balanced beauty with practicality and purity with decoration. By 1903, Greene & Greene began to offer cohesive design services for their clients. The firm dissolved in 1922.