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This was the fourth design by Irving Gill for the San Diego civic activist and residential developer, Mary Cossitt.

This house was located across the street from the George Marston House in the Hillcrest district of San Diego, CA. Cossitt planned the residence's style to harmonize stylistically with its neighbors; in this case, the neighborhood ensemble reflected Gill's minimalistic interpretation of the Prairie Style, an idiom of which he was well aware, having worked in Sullivan's office with Wright. According to architectural historian Thomas Hines, "...Gill's familiarity with [Frank Lloyd] Wright's turn-of the-century Prairie Style and the larger Arts and Crafts Movement that spawned it found expression in a series of Southern California variants of presciently simple, geometrically abstract, two-story, hipped-roof, wood-trimmed, stucco Craftsman houses. Of these, the most significant were those built for two couples who were Seventh Avenue neighbors of the Marstons and Burnhams: Frederick and Mary Cossitt and Alice Lee and Katherine Teats. Predating Wright's own Stewart House, Montecito (1909-1910), Hebbard & Gill's Seventh Avenue cluster, along with Greene & Greene's Pasadena work constituted the first genuine Southern California progeny of the Midwestern Prairie Style of Wright and his followers." (See Thomas S. Hines, Irving Gill and the Architecture of Reform, (New York: Monacelli Press, 2000, p. 57-59.)

PCAD id: 5460