Arts And Crafts Movement

Orange County collectors and homeowners who are exhausted by the "more is more" approach to decorating are turning to furniture and designs of the revived Arts and Crafts movement. Works from this turn-of-the-century movement embraced simple, straightforward designs made of quality material with enduring construction techniques. Though conceived in Great Britain in 1880, the movement has always been quintessentially Californian.

Los Angeles paper artist Anna Bondoc can make a graphic statement at practically any scale. Take handmade place cards for the Thanksgiving table, for example. “It's a nice alternative to thinking big and florid,” she said. “It's thinking small and repeated.” Bondoc draws from influences that include the Arts and Crafts movement, Japanese printmaking traditions and the midcentury textiles of the likes of Marimekko to create one-of-a-kind pieces. She's a master of the X-acto knife, using a layered paper-cutout technique for her work.

Who says you can't live in the past? Patrick Sheridan does, and he loves every minute of it. The Laguna Beach designer is enthralled by architecture and furniture created during the turn-of-the-century American Arts and Crafts movement. Works embraced simple, straightforward designs made of quality material with enduring construction techniques. They were conceived as a reaction to an underlying distrust of the Industrial Age.

To say Steve Weaver is a Greene & Greene fan is an understatement. His two-story Craftsman in the Belmont Park neighborhood of Long Beach is a hybrid of classic Arts and Crafts styling and modern function. Portions look like they are straight out of Greene & Greene's Gamble House in Pasadena. On the exterior, Craftsman clues are abundant: low rooflines, exposed and cantilevered rafter tails, tapered columns and casement windows. Inside, crisscrossed planks of quarter-sawn Honduran mahogany from which period pendant lights hang are duplicated in several areas.

At the turn of the century, California design meant cozy bungalows on large yards that complemented this area's incredible climate and natural resources. * There were Craftsman bungalows, as well as Mission Revival, Spanish Colonial and other styles that used references from other lands but still created a house that was particular to California.

Leslie Greene Bowman picked up the modest, hand-hammered copper jardiniere: a prime example of an art movement born out of a reaction against the Industrial Revolution, she said. "You can see the hammer marks," noted Bowman, associate curator at the County Museum of Art. "They were left on purpose because now that a machine could make something perfectly, it became desirable to leave the vestiges of hand craftsmanship."

Having fled corporate America for life on a 54-acre Ojai ranch of razor-edged mountains and plunging valleys, Bill Moses now wants to turn the vast spread into a sort of living museum that would be the first of its kind in Ventura County. Taking center stage is the Pratt House, a 1909 four-bedroom, craftsman-style home once called an "American masterpiece" by Architectural Digest.

When Wendy Kaplan became curator of decorative arts at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art seven years ago, she knew that part of her job was to work with Max Palevsky. Museum staff members routinely advise and assist potential art donors, but Palevsky was a special case -- a major supporter who was building a collection of Arts and Crafts furniture and decorative arts for LACMA.

The Arts and Crafts movement met its maker in the Eden of California circa 1890, when and where the tenets of a high ideal converged to create a little something known as "the good life." It was only to last for 20 or so years, but in that time it left shining vestiges of its progeny on a landscape it can rightfully call its own.

In the early 1900s, the American Arts and Crafts movement spread west to such diverse communities as Pasadena, Riverside, Redlands and Anaheim. Laguna Beach, then a quiescent town dotted with a scant number of bungalows along its shore and in its hills, received its share of craftsman-style homes inspired by the movement. Most of those original beach homes have been razed, replaced by modern structures.

When you think of the Southern California's arts and crafts movement, you probably think of Pasadena, home to architects Charles and Henry Greene and tile maker Ernest Batchelder. But don't overlook the small community of Garvanza just to the southwest of Pasadena in Highland Park. This unassuming neighborhood, named for the garbanzo beans that once covered its hills, also played a vital role in the craftsman craze of the early 1900s. A group of artisans known as the Arroyo Guild plunked down their creative roots and joined together there to design and build "useful things of superlative excellence and beauty.

I was recently invited to review a superb jazz festival in Cheltenham, about two hours west of London, in the Cotswolds. "You're going to the Cotswolds?" my friends gushed. "Yes," I said. " Hugh Masekela will be there. And Jack DeJohnette. Nigel Kennedy. Madeleine Peyroux. Nice lineup." "Yes, but the Cotswolds!" they said, without the slightest interest in the jazz festival. "Be sure to go to Chipping Campden. And the Slaughters. Bourton-on-the-Water. Stow-on-the-Wold."

When Wendy Kaplan became curator of decorative arts at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art seven years ago, she knew that part of her job was to work with Max Palevsky. Museum staff members routinely advise and assist potential art donors, but Palevsky was a special case -- a major supporter who was building a collection of Arts and Crafts furniture and decorative arts for LACMA.

Look deeper. There's always more. Father Fred Bailey often challenges his Aliso Viejo parishioners to do that when examining their faith, but come Nov. 5 he'll be directing their gazes toward a more material wonder: a new $13-million Craftsman-style church.

Robert Winter's new book, "The Architecture of Entertainment: L.A. in the Twenties," details how advertising and movies introduced eclecticism and exoticism to Southern California architecture. Passages from the work: BY 1929 an estimated 20 million to 30 million Americans were watching movies every week, and the film industry was claiming the largest portion of the average American's recreation budget.

ROBERT WINTER doesn't hesitate when asked if he feels the presence of famed tile maker Ernest Batchelder and his wife in this Pasadena home. "Oh my, yes," says Winter, chuckling. "The fireplace reminds me the Batchelders are here. Alice's piano still echoes through the house, even though it's on a phonograph record. So far they've been awful nice to me." As they should.

Tight structure underlies the diverse oeuvre of painter, industrial and graphic designer Winold Reiss. It runs through the highly stylistic, art nouveau designs he did for hotels and restaurant interiors as well as the mosaic murals he completed for the Cincinnati Union Terminal. As a way of dealing with space Reiss favored a sharp-edged compression of strictly simplified forms. This and a keen color sense allowed him to layer multiple forms in his murals without visual confusion.

At the heyday of the Arts and Crafts movement, Los Angeles was building so vigorously that it still contains one of the world's largest uninterrupted swaths of what came to be known as Craftsman houses. Yet those expecting the Los Angeles County Museum of Art show "The Arts and Crafts Movement in Europe and America, 1880--1920" to mirror back the city's leaded windows, shingled roofs, sleeping porches and wrought iron porch lamps are in for a shock.

At the heyday of the Arts and Crafts movement, Los Angeles was building so vigorously that it still contains one of the world's largest uninterrupted swaths of what came to be known as Craftsman houses. Yet those expecting the Los Angeles County Museum of Art show "The Arts and Crafts Movement in Europe and America, 1880--1920" to mirror back the city's leaded windows, shingled roofs, sleeping porches and wrought iron porch lamps are in for a shock.

Having fled corporate America for life on a 54-acre Ojai ranch of razor-edged mountains and plunging valleys, Bill Moses now wants to turn the vast spread into a sort of living museum that would be the first of its kind in Ventura County. Taking center stage is the Pratt House, a 1909 four-bedroom, craftsman-style home once called an "American masterpiece" by Architectural Digest.