American Bungalow: Where Art and Life Are One

Friends and family,

A very good article

[including photos of James Hubbell’s tile work] has just come out in American Bungalow on our home. We wanted to share it with you so are sending an article the magazine has written to advertise the latest issue. It should be on the newsstands this week.

All good  wishes and love,
Carolyn and Tom

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Where Art and Life Are One

When Carolyn and Tom Owen-Towle bought a gracefully proportioned but somewhat faded Craftsman home in San Diego’s historic Bankers Hill neighborhood in 1978, just two years after plans to demolish it had fallen through, they thought colorful paint and great-looking rugs were all it would take to bring it back to life.

But the couple, then new co-ministers (and now ministers emeriti) at San Diego’s First Unitarian Universalist Church, asked architectural historian and preservationist Rurik Kallis to restore a damaged window.

Kallis complied, then suggested restoring the window seat beneath it.

Then the entire room.

When they saw the result, Carolyn and Tom realized they had begun a journey of restoration they would have to complete, no matter how long it took.

“We felt a responsibility—almost a calling, really—to reclaim that beauty,” Carolyn says.

Forty years later, they have brought it all back home, as revealed in a feature article in the new Fall issue of American Bungalow magazine.

And because Carolyn is the daughter of the famed California artist, arts educator and curator Millard Owen Sheets, the stately yet festive home today houses a substantial collection of Sheets’s own luminous paintings and of the world art he and Carolyn’s mother collected during their decades of travel abroad.

The article, adapted and expanded by American Bungalow editor John Luke from one published in North Park News in January, appears in the magazine’s Fall 2009 issue, No. 63. San Diego writer Julie Kolb, who wrote the North Park News article, helped with the adaptation.

The Fall issue also features articles on the restored Orpheum Theater, a vaudeville-era palace built in Phoenix, Ariz., in 1929; a historic Craftsman Foursquare in Kansas City, Mo.; the first in a planned series of articles on the Arts and Crafts–inspired Southwest style, featuring Phantom Ranch, on the floor of the Grand Canyon; and a unique 1915 Craftsman home in the verdant Laurelhurst neighborhood of Portland, Ore.

American Bungalow, published quarterly since 1990, covers all aspects of the American Arts and Crafts movement, which thrived during the first three decades of the 20th century and has experienced a popular revival in recent decades. The movement gave rise to the iconic American middle-class home, the Craftsman bungalow, as well as to classic “ultimate bungalows” such as those designed in California by Charles and Henry Greene.

In addition to its lavishly illustrated features, each issue carries news of upcoming and ongoing Arts and Crafts events and destinations, new furnishings and other products for Arts and Crafts and bungalow living, and the magazine’s most popular regular feature, Family Album, where proud homeowners share snapshot photos and heartfelt appreciations of their bungalow homes.

American Bungalow can be purchased in San Diego at Bookstar, Horton Bookstand, Hillcrest News, and Paras News.  The publication is also available at Barnes and Noble, B. Dalton, Hastings and independent booksellers and newsstands nationwide. For more information, visit ambungalow.com or call 800 350-3363.