Architect

Myron Hunt

1868–1952

Profile

About Myron Hunt.

Pasadena-based architect whose institutional and residential work shaped the formal civic and estate landscape of the SGV in the early 20th century. Frequently partnered with Elmer Grey.

Wallace Neff gave the San Gabriel Valley its most romantic houses. Myron Hunt built the stage they stand on. The Rose Bowl, the Huntington, Pasadena’s Central Library, the hotel now called the Langham Huntington: the Valley’s civic and institutional identity is Hunt’s work to a degree no other single architect can claim. That matters to a buyer in a specific way, because Hunt shaped the settings that hold value across whole neighborhoods, and when a residential Hunt attribution surfaces, it is rare, documented, and checkable.

From Steinway Hall to Pasadena

Myron Hubbard Hunt (Wikidata Q6948452) was born February 27, 1868 in Sunderland, Massachusetts, and raised in Chicago. He studied at Northwestern University from 1888 to 1890, took his architecture degree at MIT in 1893, and spent the next two years studying buildings in Europe, with a long stretch in Italy absorbing the early Renaissance work that would echo through his California career (Pacific Coast Architecture Database). Back in Chicago he opened his own practice in 1897 and shared eleventh-floor office space in Steinway Hall with Dwight Perkins, Robert Spencer, and a young Frank Lloyd Wright, who later named Hunt in his writings as an early member of the group that became the Prairie School. Hunt built roughly 39 buildings in Evanston alone before his wife’s health sent the family west in 1903.

In Southern California he became Registered Architect number 338 under the state’s new licensing law and formed the partnership of Hunt and Grey with Elmer Grey, which ran from 1903 to 1910 and made the pair the architects of choice for Pasadena’s wealthiest households. The American Institute of Architects elevated Hunt to Fellowship in 1908. He practiced alone from 1911 to 1920, then formed Hunt and Chambers with Harold C. Chambers, who had started in the office as a draftsman in 1907; that partnership ran until 1947 (Pacific Coast Architecture Database). By the end, the City of Pasadena’s own library service credits him with more than 400 buildings across the Southland. His professional papers, the Myron Hubbard Hunt Collection of more than 4,000 pieces, are held at the Huntington Library, which makes Hunt, like Neff, an architect whose attributions can be settled against a primary archive. He died May 26, 1952.

The Huntington and the San Marino landscape

Hunt’s defining client relationship was with Henry E. Huntington. In San Marino, Hunt and Grey designed the 55,000 square foot Beaux-Arts residence constructed from 1909 to 1911 for Henry and Arabella Huntington, the building that is now the Huntington Art Gallery, along with the 1911 garage that is now the MaryLou and George Boone Gallery and the 1911 billiard room and bowling alley building that now houses the Rose Garden Tea Room (The Huntington). After the partnership dissolved, Hunt returned alone to design the 96,000 square foot Library building of 1919, the monumental core of what became one of the world’s great independent research libraries.

The relationship reached beyond the estate. When Huntington bought Pasadena’s failed Wentworth Hotel in 1911, Hunt redesigned it, and it reopened in 1914 as the Huntington Hotel, the city’s leading hotel for decades and today the Langham Huntington. Earlier, from 1904 to 1913, Hunt’s office carried out the Mount Wilson Observatory complex for the Carnegie Institution, high in the San Gabriel Mountains above the Valley. Few architects can claim a footprint that runs from a mountaintop observatory to a Gilded Age gallery.

The Rose Bowl and the Civic Center

The Rose Bowl (NRHP 87000755, designated a National Historic Landmark February 27, 1987) is Hunt’s most famous structure. For the 1922 stadium he studied classical Greek and Roman stadiums, including Pompeii, modeled the curve of the seating bowl on the Yale Bowl, and used a cut and fill technique, excavating the field 25 feet down and banking the spoil to carry the seats. The stadium opened with about 57,000 seats, and Hunt himself designed the expansions for the 1932 Olympics that brought capacity to nearly 84,000 (National Park Service NHL nomination).

Five years after the stadium opened, Hunt and Chambers won the 1924 competition for the Central Library, the northern anchor of Pasadena’s new Civic Center. Construction began May 19, 1925, and the library was dedicated February 12, 1927, the first building completed in the Civic Center plan (City of Pasadena). It is a contributing structure in the Pasadena Civic Center District, listed on the National Register in 1980 (NRHP 80000813), it earned a National Preservation Honor Award from the National Trust in 1990, and it is currently closed for a seismic retrofit, a reminder that even landmark civic fabric carries maintenance cycles a neighborhood should watch. Hunt’s institutional catalog around the Valley runs deep: the Polytechnic School of 1907, the campus plan for Throop that became Caltech, the Flintridge Biltmore Hotel of 1927 in La Canada Flintridge that now serves as Flintridge Sacred Heart, and the 1940 main building of Huntington Memorial Hospital. Beyond the Valley’s edge he was principal architect of Occidental College through 1940, designed Bridges Hall of Music at Pomona College in Claremont in 1915, planned the Kellogg ranch that became the Cal Poly Pomona campus, and built the Ambassador Hotel of 1921, since demolished.

The Altadena record

Hunt’s Altadena work shows the personal side of an institutional career. Villa Carlotta at 234 East Mendocino Street, completed in 1917 and listed on the National Register on June 17, 2014, is a 7,000 square foot Mission Revival house Hunt designed as the retirement home of Francis R. Welles, who had directed Bell Telephone Manufacturing in Europe for more than 30 years. Welles asked Hunt to fold in details of the family estate in France, and the tall windows, high ceilings, and paneled library carry it; the same paneling instinct surfaces a decade later in the Central Library reading rooms. It was one of the first Altadena houses with electrical wiring in its original plans, and the family threaded seven Bell telephones through it as an intercom system (Altadena Heritage; Wikipedia). Villa Carlotta survived the Eaton Fire of January 2025, along with both homes adjacent to it.

Two institutional commissions round out the Altadena story. Five Acres, the children’s services campus Hunt and Chambers designed at 760 W. Mountain View Street, opened in 1926 at a cost of about 800,000 dollars, survived the fire that destroyed thousands of structures around it, and marks the centennial of its Hunt campus in 2026 (Five Acres). And after a 1935 canyon fire destroyed the La Vina tuberculosis sanatorium, Hunt designed its 51-bed replacement, among California’s first structures designed for seismic safety (Altadena Heritage). In a community rebuilding around its architectural heritage, Hunt’s surviving Altadena buildings are load-bearing pieces of that story.

What a Hunt attribution means in the 2026 market

Hunt residential attributions reach the Valley market far less often than Neff attributions, because so much of Hunt’s catalog is institutional and because his houses cluster in neighborhoods where they rarely trade. When one does surface, the verification path is the same: the Myron Hubbard Hunt Collection at the Huntington Library preserves the office record, and the Register record settles designation claims. Villa Carlotta shows what a documented claim looks like, a named house with a verifiable listing date. Hunt’s own 1905 house at 200 North Grand Avenue in Pasadena remains a private residence, and the gardens he designed for it survive in the Frances Benjamin Johnston photographs at the Library of Congress even though the gardens themselves do not (Library of Congress).

Condition reads on a Hunt house reward the same discipline as any architectural property. His Mediterranean Revival and Italian Renaissance work depends on proportion, plasterwork, ironwork, and millwork, and I read those houses the way my building years, 1978 to 1998, taught me to read them, at the level of the finish work. A Hunt interior with its original fabric intact is an asset; a gutted one is a floor plan with a famous name. And because Hunt built so much of the Valley’s civic frame, even buyers who never own a Hunt house are buying into his work: the stadium, the library, the gallery, and the hotel anchor the neighborhoods around them. If a Hunt-labeled listing crosses your search, start with the architectural home buyer due diligence framework and take the attribution to the archive before you take the asking price at face value.

Styles

Associated Styles.

Works

Notable Works in the SGV.

Sources

Sources and references.

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