• The Gamble House, also known as David B. Gamble House, (constructed 1908 - 1909) is a National Historic Landmark and museum in Pasadena, California, USA. It was designed by the architectural firm Greene and Greene, brothers Charles Sumner Greene and Henry Mather Greene, as a home for David B. Gamble of the Procter & Gamble company.
• Originally intended as a winter residence for David and Mary Gamble, the three-story Gamble House is a residential ark commonly described as America's Arts and Crafts masterpiece, whose style shows influence from traditional Japanese aesthetics and a certain California spaciousness born of available land and a permissive climate. Arts-and-Crafts architecture was focused on the use of natural materials, attention to detail, aesthetics, and craftsmanship.
• Rooms in the Gamble House were built using multiple kinds of wood; the teak, maple, oak, Port Orford Cedar, and mahogany surfaces are placed in sequences to bring out contrasts of color, tone and grain. Inlay in the custom furniture designed by the architects matches inlay in the tile mantle surrounds, and the interlocking joinery on the main staircase was left exposed. One of the wooden panels in the entry hall is actually a concealed door leading to the kitchen, and another panel opens to a clothes closet. The Greenes used an experienced team of local contractors who had worked together for them in Pasadena on a several previous homes, including the Hall brothers, Peter and John, who are responsible for the high quality of the woodworking in the house and its furniture.
• The sensuous woods, the generously low and horizontal room shapes, and the quality of natural light that filters through the art glass exterior windows, coexist with a relatively traditional plan, in which most rooms are regularly shaped and organized around a central hall. Although the house is not as spatially adventurous as the contemporary works of Frank Lloyd Wright or even of the earlier New England "Shingle Style," its mood is casual and its symmetries tend to be localized - i.e. symmetrically organized spaces and forms in asymmetrical relationships to one another. Ceiling heights are different on the first (8'10") and second floors (8'8") and in the den (9'10") and the forms and scales of the spaces are constantly shifting, especially as one moves from the interior of the house to its second-floor semi-enclosed porches and its free-form terraces, front and rear. The third floor was planned as a billiard room, but was used as an attic by the Gamble family.
Note: • In Back to the Future, the house served as the exterior of Doc Brown's mansion. While the Greene's Blacker House was used for interior shots.
