Ernest Albert Coxhead (1863-1933)
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13 June 2012
Holy Innocents Church in San Francisco
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27 October 2004
Ernest Coxhead House in San Mateo
Ernest Albert Coxhead was born in East Sussex, England. He became an architect through apprenticeship rather than academic training.
When he was fifteen, he began working for a civil engineer who designed public projects and residential developments. After five years, he moved to London where he restored Gothic churches.
In 1886, Albert and his brother Almeric moved to Los Angeles. They established an independent practice and designed several Episcopal Churches in Southern California.
In 1890, the brothers moved to San Francisco. Their firm, Coxhead & Coxhead, built seventeen churches of which eleven are extant. Ernest designed the buildings, and Almeric managed the construction.
After the death of Coxhead's client, Episcopal Bishop William Kip, in 1893, Coxhead & Coxhead turned to residential work in San Francisco, Palo Alto, Alameda and Berkeley.
Coxhead's shingled Arts and Crafts buildings influenced Bay Area architects Bernard Maybeck, Willis Polk, A. Page Brown, John Galen Howard, Julia Morgan, Edgar Mathews, Albert Farr, Joseph Worcester, A. C. Schweinfurth, Louis Christian Mullgardt and other practitioners of the First Bay Tradition.
You can view Coxhead's buildings in chronological order here, or use a link in the following table to visit a specific property.
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The Coxhead building is on the right. As seen in this photograph, Pacific Heights and Presdio Heights contain disparate architectural styles which coexist harmoniously because of their scale, design and workmanship.
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Villa Savoye in Poissy, France, Near Paris
Photo Courtesy Wikipedia
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3153 Pacific Avenue
Built 1907
Photographed 17 October 2019
Ernest Coxhead used a Prairie School approach on this stucco house in which modular bands of windows and intervening stucco spandrels are projected from the face of the building.
Source: Here Today: San Francisco's Architectural Heritage by the Junior League of San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 1968
I think that this building anticipated the Bauhaus and International architectural styles by twenty years.
It reminds me of an Arts and Craft forerunner of the Villa Savoye designed by Le Corbusier and built of reinforced concrete in Poissy, France, between 1928 and 1931.