During her 1917 trip to California, Frances Benjamin Johnston photographed dozens of houses and gardens. Many black-and-white negatives produced on that trip were later transformed into hand-colored lantern-slides, but this view of the Gamble House in Pasadena was not.
Built by Greene & Greene in 1908, it still exists, though no longer as a private house. Today it is preserved as a sort of architectural museum-monument to itself – the apotheosis of the pared-down, hand-worked, Japanese-influenced, California-vernacular style.