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During the past five years, some imaginative urbanites have solved the problem of affordable housing by buy ing architecturally distinguished fixer-uppers on West Adams Boulevard, just southwest of downtown Los Angeles. The portion of the boulevard that extends east from Crenshaw Boulevard to Vermont Avenue was a fashionable neighborhood in the 1900s and today is a melting pot of styles-Victorian, Greek Revival, Dutch Colonial, Moorish and Egyptian-and even something that's called Tahitian-Edwardian. But it is the street's Japo-Swiss-style Craftsman bungalows-West Adam's distinctively Californian architectural legacy-that are at the center of current restoration efforts.
The leaders of the Craftsman Movement in the United States-Gustav Stickley and Charles and Henry Greene among others-rejected the idea of a house as a showplace and instead designed houses for comfortable living and as "havens of rest." A Craftsman bungalow is simple and sturdy with heavy beams, elephantine columns, strong straight lines, dark interior wood trim and extensive built-ins. Interior details are natural and were handcrafted in a reaction against the machine-made ornamentation of the Industrial Age. The airy, spacious rooms were designed to be complete in themselves.
"I like a room which looks its best when the sun streams into it through wide open doors and windows," Gustav Stickley wrote in the early part of the century. Sleeping porches, loggias, pergolas, "outdoor living rooms" and gardens were created to encourage healthy indoor / outdoor living. Exteriors of the houses blend horizontally with the landscape, with oversize eaves and rustic shingle exteriors stained green or brown. In those ways, the Craftsman bungalow was, despite its anti-machine-age design, the first modern house.
Because Craftsman homes combine old-fashioned graciousness with...