F. J. Martin Apartment Building
Pasadena, California
1903
This series of drawings for a “Block of Dwelling Houses”
shows the Greenes’ willingness to attempt a design in
the Mission Revival idiom. The drawings show four houses of two stories and a half basement. There are Mission Style elements throughout the houses: the high roof line, the
tile roof of the porches, and the timber posts of the porches. Spanish tiles clad the shed roof
areas over doorways and the segmental arc of the parapets suggest mission architecture. The
foundation is covered with cobble stones as are the supports of the porches. The outer corner stones were specified "to be large." Large rectangular windows are evenly spaced across the facade. There is a high vertical window next to the door with turned spindles as grillwork. Each
house had a living room and dining room (with a pocket door between), and a kitchen with a screen porch off that. Upstairs there were three bedrooms and a bathroom from which one could enter onto the deck over the porch below. The Arts and Crafts sensibility is seen nonetheless in the piled boulders that flank the doorways.