So what happened today? It rained overnight, so it would have been silly to travel to Palm Springs and back, so we stayed in the area. The Gamble House is a renouned Arts and Crafts movement house - they say the best example in America. If you arrive there at 11:30am (when the bookshop opens), you can normally get a ticket to one of the one hour tours of the inside that run between noon and three pm. Somehow the bookshop was open earlier, and the first tour was at 11:45 - and we were on it.
It is a shingle house of three stories plus basement. They appear to have only used wood in the construction - no nails. The woodwork is really good, and there is a lot of designer glass. Motifs are repeated throughout the house. For example, the front doors and over-Windows have a tree with flowers decoration. This is repeated in the wood carvings along the top of the walls in the lounge room, and in inlays of semiprecious stones in the bed heads in the main bedroom. All the wood carvings use the grain of the wood to enhance the carving.
There is a self guided walk of the neighbourhood, which we completed next, including a Frank Lloyd Wright house, and many houses built by the architects of the Gamble house (the Gambles owned Proctor and Gamble). This was well worth doing.
After (or rather during) the walk, Charlotte was hungry, so we went to the Umami burger place in Pasadena for special hamburgers, and to the cold slab ice cream place for mixed ice cream (like the concrete places in Canberra, only they mix the ice cream on a cold marble slab, by hand.
By this time, it was time to go home, do my washing, and go to the airport. As usual, there was a traffic jam on part of the freeway, but I got there on time.
The Frank Lloyd Wright house looked rather unlived in.
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