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A Collector Shares Her Passion with Major Donation
By Bobbie Bagel
November/December 2019
 Hilltop by Sam Hyde Harris, 20" x 16", oil on board. Photo by Robert Veres |
 Vintage Bauer pottery now brightens the Marston House kitchen. Photo by Bobbie Bagel |
 A six-foot Lifetime Furniture oak settle with a handwoven Native American rug in the upstairs gallery. Photo by Bobbie Bagel |
Christmas came early to the Marston House this year. We received a marvelous gift of Arts and Crafts furnishings: an L. & J.G. Stickley Morris chair, two settles, a rocker, assorted tables, lamps, several Native American rugs, vintage Bauer pottery, and a painting by Sam Hyde Harris, an important California plein-air artist.
This generous donation came from long-time SOHO supporter Marlene E. King. A graduate of the University of California, San Diego with a master's degree in education from Stanford, she worked and lived at the Bishop's School in La Jolla for six years. There she began to appreciate Irving Gill's architecture.
"Walking the exterior hallways, with their wide skylights and handsome archways, I learned to love Gill's mastery of line, light, proportion, and modernity, with no fussy ornamentation of any kind," King recalled. "The dorm rooms of the boarders had the truest remnants of Gill's philosophy. No baseboards—they were dust catchers. No doors to their closets, simply a curtain of monk cloth. And those deep outdoor sleeping porches."
Her love affair with the Arts and Crafts movement began around 1980. While browsing in a Berkeley antique shop, King said, "The Craftsman furniture bug bit, and bit hard. A beautiful lamp attributed to Lillian Palmer, with carnelian stones on the base has never lost its luster for me in 39 years."
King joined SOHO in 1985. While reading her first SOHO newsletter, she spotted a real estate ad for a three-story 1911 Prairie-style home originally landscaped by Kate Sessions on Mt. Nebo in La Mesa. "We drove like crazed people to Mt. Nebo to see this home that very evening." King purchased it and moved from a Spanish Colonial Revival home in Burlingame to La Mesa.
Now a Rancho Santa Fe resident, King's collection has grown over the years. She felt this was the right time to share it. We are supremely grateful that she chose the Marston House and SOHO for this important gift.
How does it feel to donate so many fine pieces?
"I feel wonderful. I highly recommend it!" she said. "I encourage people to look to their own collections that they love and ask themselves if they use or admire them less than when they were in the "hunting" phase of collecting. Donate. Share. Let some of your beloved pieces serve to inspire others to collect. Extend the love of collecting to the love of preserving historical properties.
"After all," King added, "don't you think that as citizens of San Diego we are all "collectors" when it comes to preserving historical buildings? It benefits everyone."
SOHO couldn't agree more. Thank you, Marlene King!
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