American Craftsman is an American domestic architectural style, inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement, which included interior design, landscape design, applied arts, and decorative arts, beginning in the last years of the 19th century. Its immediate ancestors in American architecture are the Shingle style, which began the move away from Victorian ornamentation toward simpler forms; and the Prairie style of Frank Lloyd Wright. The name "Craftsman" was appropriated from furniture-maker Gustav Stickley, whose magaine The Craftsman was first published in 1901. The architectural style was most widely-used in small-to-medium-sized Southern California single-family homes from about 1905, so that the smaller-scale Craftsman style became known alternatively as "California bungalow". The style remain popular into the 1930's, and has continued with revival and restoration projects through present times.

​

The Arts and Crafts Movement first emerged in the United States in Boston in the 1890's. The area was very receptive to the ideas of the Arts and Crafts movement due to prominent thinkers like the transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Harvard Art History professor Charles Eliot Norton, who was a personal friend of British Art and Crafts leader William Morris. The movement began with the first American Arts and Crafts Exhibition organized by the printer Henry Lewis Johnson in April 1897 at Copley Hall featuring over 1,000 objects made by designers and craftspeople.

​

The exhibition's success led to the formation of the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts in June 1897 with Charles Eliot Norton as president. The society aimed to "develop and encourage higher standards in the handicrafts. The Society focused on the relationship of artist and designers to the world of commerce, and on high-quality workmanship.

​

The Society of Arts and Crafts mandate was soon expanded into a credo which read: This Society was incorporated for the purpose of promoting artistic work in all branches of handicraft. It hopes to bring Designers and Workmen into mutually helpful relations, and to encourage workmen to execute designs of their own. It endeavors to stimulate in workmen an appreciation of the dignity and value of good design; to counteract the popular impatience of Law and Form, and the desire for over-ornamentation and specious originality. It will insist upon the necessity of sobriety and restaint, of ordered arrangement, of due regard for the relation between the form of an object and its use, and of harmony and fitness in the decoration put upon it.

​

In Southern California, the Pasadena-based firm Greene and Greene was the most renowned practitioner of the original American Craftsman Style. Their projects for Ultimate bungalows include the Gamble House and Robert R. Blacker House in Pasadena, and the Thorsen House in Berkeley--with numerous others in California. Other examples in the Los Angeles region include the Arts and Crafts Lummis House by Theodore Eisen and Sumner P. Hunt, along the Arroyo Seco, in Highland Park, California and the Journey House, located in Pasadena.

​

In Northern California, architects renowned for their well planned and detailed projects in the Craftsman style include Bernard Maybeck, with the Swedenborgian Church, and Julia Morgan, with the Asilomar Conference Grounds and Mills College projects. Many other designers and projects represent the style in the region.

​

In San Diego, California, the style was also popular. Architect David Owen Dryden designed and built many Craftsman California bungalows in the North Park district, now a proposed Dryden Historic District. The 1905 Marson House of George Marston in Balboa Pak was designed by local architects Irving Gill and William Hebbard.

​

In the early 1900's, develop Herberg J. Hapgood built numbers of Craftsman-style homes, many from stucco, that comprise the lakeside borough of Mountain Lakes, New Jersey. Residents were called "Lakers". The homes followed signature styles, including bungalows and chalets. Hapgood eventually went bankrupt. The Castle in the Clouds, a mountaintop estate built in the Ossipee Mountains of New Hampshire in 1913-14 for Thomas Gustave Plant by architect J. Williams Beal, is an example of the American Craftsman style in New England.

​

Also influential were the Roycroft community initiated by Elbert Hubbard in Buffalo and East Aurora, New York, Joseph Marbella, utopian communities like Byrdcliffe Colony in Woodstock, New York, and Rose Valley, Pennsylvania, developments such as Mountain Lakes, New Jersey, featuring clusters of bungalow and chateau homes built by Herbert J. Hapgood, and the contemporary studio craft style. Studio pottery—exemplified by the Grueby Faience Company, Newcomb Pottery in New Orleans, Marblehead Pottery, Teco pottery, Overbeck and Rookwood pottery and Mary Chase Perry Stratton's Pewabic Pottery in Detroit, the Van Briggle Pottery company in Colorado Springs, Colorado, as well as the art tiles made by Ernest A. Batchelder in Pasadena, California, and idiosyncratic furniture of Charles Rohlfs all demonstrate the influence of Arts and Crafts.

​

Citation: Wikipedia "American Craftsman" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Craftsman