George White Marston commissioned this house in 1905, the same year he was leading the campaign to develop San Diego's City Park as a naturalistic public landscape. Marston, who built the city's leading department store and then spent seven decades funding civic causes, hired the architectural partnership of William Sterling Hebbard and Irving John Gill to design a residence on five acres at the park's northwest corner. The house was completed during the final years of that eleven-year partnership, which dissolved in 1907, and it represents a transitional moment before Gill developed the stripped concrete modernism that would define his later career. The Marston family occupied the house for eighty-two years, from 1905 until 1987.
The 8,500-square-foot residence contains twenty-four rooms organized under a broad low-pitched roof with deep eaves. The exterior combines shingled and stuccoed surfaces in the American Arts and Crafts idiom, emphasizing horizontal lines and unpainted natural materials. Inside, the house features built-in cabinetry, exposed structural elements, simple mouldings, and the restrained craft detail characteristic of the movement at its most disciplined. The five-acre grounds include formal and informal gardens and a canyon area, developed over decades in collaboration with the Marstons, creating one of the few intact Arts and Crafts house-and-garden ensembles in California.
