Gamble House

About this property

The Gamble House, also known as the David B. Gamble House, is a historic American Craftsman home in Pasadena California designed by the architectural firm of Greene and Greene. Constructed in 1908–1909 as a winter home for David B. Gamble, son of Procter & Gamble founder James Gamble, it is a National Historic Landmark and a California Historical Landmark. It is open to the public regularly for tours and events. Like a number of other wealthy Midwestern families, David and Mary Gamble chose to spend their winters in Pasadena, escaping the harsher climate of Cincinnati, where the Procter & Gamble Company was (and is) based. They were drawn to nearby examples of the architecture of the Greene and Greene firm, and hired the two brothers to design their home in May 1907. Considering that many Greene and Greene homes have been altered to some degree and stripped of original furnishings designed for them by the architects, the Gamble House is rare in being intact and unaltered, as well as containing all of its original Greene and Greene furniture. David and Mary Gamble lived in the house during the winter months until their deaths in 1923 and 1929, respectively. Mary's younger sister Julia lived in the house until her death in 1943. Cecil Huggins Gamble and his wife Louise Gibbs Gamble lived in the house beginning in 1946. They briefly considered selling it, until prospective buyers spoke of painting the interior woodwork white. In 1966, the Gamble family turned the house over to the city of Pasadena in a joint agreement with the University of Southern California (USC) School of Architecture. The Gamble House was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1977. Today, two competitively selected students live in the house, changing annually. Examples of the Greenes' architecture, including the Gamble House, fell out of fashion and were largely ignored by architectural critics during the 1930s and 40s. After the Second World War, however, their work received newfound popularity, mainly due to the efforts of Elizabeth Gordon, editor of House Beautiful magazine. Gamble House was included in a list of all-time top 10 houses in Los Angeles in a Los Angeles Times survey of experts in December 2008. The exterior of the house gained worldwide exposure as the Brown Mansion, the home (in 1955) of Emmett "Doc" Brown in the 1985 movie Back to the Future and more prominently in the 1990 movie Back to the Future Part III. Additionally, the house was featured on This Old House with then host Bob Vila in 1987. In November 2019, ownership switched from the School of Architecture at University of Southern California to the Gamble House Conservancy run by the city of Pasadena.

Location

Categories

Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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