By 1890, both brothers had moved to a booming Denver, Colorado, awash with architects and civic art clubs and rapidly filling with Richardsonian Romanesque buildings downtown.

[3] Hart began his architectural career in Denver, finding work in 1898 as a draftsman for the firm of Willis A. Marean and Albert J. Norton, who later designed the Colorado Governor's Mansion (1908).

He then spent a year working for the young firm of Meyer and O'Brien before joining the firm of Bliss and Faville just in time to work on their most famous project, the St. Francis Hotel, and other major buildings arising from the ashes of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, including the Neoclassical architecture of the Bank of California and the more Beaux-Arts style of the Union Savings Bank (1909), the Columbia (now Geary) Theater (1909), and the Masonic Temple (1912).

[6] In 1911 he became a licensed architect, no longer just a draftsman, and the following year designed his own home on a steep hillside in Piedmont, California, a modest but well-crafted, wood-shingled house with rustic features worthy of Maybeck, including porch columns of bark-sheathed redwood.

He also worked with John McLaren, the horticulturist who designed Golden Gate Park, on a unique long, towering fence frame covered with iceplants along the main entrance of the exposition.

In between scarce commissions, the new partners published a series of articles in Architect and Engineer of California on planned communities of the kind envisioned by the Garden city movement.

One article extolled the virtues of "English cottage" (Tudor Revival) styles for suburban living, a style they employed to good effect in designing houses and landscaping lots in the newly expanding suburb of Burlingame, California (billed as a "City of Trees") and in a wooded residential subdivision for its workers commissioned by Pacific Electric Metals Company of Bay Point, California, east of Berkeley.

[9] Wood first arrived in Hawaiʻi in 1919, at the age of 38 and with a new partner he had met in Oakland: Charles William Dickey, who had secured two residential and two commercial commissions in Honolulu.

The First Church of Christ Scientist (1923), where he was a member, employs local materials, adapts some Hawaiian building techniques, and lies athwart cooling tradewinds in a shady tropical landscape.