Wild Wood in Altadena
This small jewel box of a cottage, a Henry Greene, created after brother Charles had decamped for Carmel in the early 1920s, after Greene & Greene's heyday,* is almost entirely unknown and in an almost entirely unknown Altadena neighborhood called Wild Wood, near the intersection of Holliston and Palm.
The heavily wooded area surrounding the Rubio Canyon wash is so secret because it's on private roads and driveways.
* An update. I've since learned that I got this wrong. Henry did the cottages down below, but the jewel box is the work of George Webster, a draftsman in the Greene & Greene office in Pasadena. That makes more sense -- it's a great little bungalow, but it's rough-hewn compared with the expensive, more finely carpentered works of the Greenes themselves.
Yet you can check it all out -- two Craftsman bungalows, an Italianate mansion, a ranch house that is more of a real ranch house than a ranchburger -- at the 60th annual home tour of the Altadena Guild of Huntington Memorial Hospital benefiting HMRI on Sunday, May 1 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Info and tix: www.altadenaguild.org.