Active primarily in California, their houses and larger-scale ultimate bungalows are prime exemplars of the American Arts and Crafts Movement.

[1] They grew up primarily in St. Louis, Missouri, and on their mother's family farm in West Virginia while their father attended medical school.

Their father, a practicing homeopathic physician by this time, was very concerned with the need for sunlight and circulating fresh air; the importance of these elements was to become one of the signatures of the brothers' work.

Charles and Henry each received a "certificate for completion of partial course", a special two-year program at MIT's School of Architecture, in 1891.

They studied classical building styles, intending at that time only to gain certification for apprenticeships with architecture and construction firms upon graduation.

After MIT in spring 1890, Charles apprenticed first with the firm of Andrews, Jaques and Rantoul; but after four and a half months, moved to the office of R. Clipston Sturgis.

The brothers agreed and, while traveling by train from Boston, they stopped at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago and saw a few examples of Japanese architecture.

In 1966, the Gamble family turned the house over to the city of Pasadena in a joint agreement with the University of Southern California (USC) School of Architecture.

Such ultimate bungalows were completely custom affairs, where the vast majority of elements—light fixtures, furniture, even woven textiles—were created for specific spaces in the home.

The Greenes developed a personal idiom within the Arts and Crafts aesthetic, receiving commissions to design furnishings for their houses.

Charles' sketches for the 1903 Mary Darling house were published in England in Academy Architecture the same year, representing the first foreign publication of the firm's work.

The visual importance of the aesthetic nature of the joints, pegs, and complex wood-work symbolizes the structure of the house, and coincides with the principles taught in the Manual Training School of their youth.

[7] On display, were formal works of the Japanese government in the form of the Ho-o-den exhibit, a scale replica of a temple in Uji, Japan.

One year later, Intrigued by the exhibit in Chicago, the Greene Brothers visited the Japanese hill and water Gardens at an exposition in San Francisco.

[9] A cloud lift is subtle elevation of a straight line for aesthetic purposes, and was used in many of the Greene Brothers works.