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Third Sunday Tours
Join our expert docents every third Sunday of the month, as they tell you stories of the Marston House and its environs and of one of San Diego's greatest architects, Irving J. Gill. With four great tour choices we understand if you can't pick just one. Bring your camera and friends.
Bankers Hill Walking Tour (Available January through October)
 10:30am · 90 minutes
$20
TOUR STARTS on the northwest corner of Albatross Street & West Walnut Avenue, San Diego 92103
The sloped terrain of Bankers Hill, near downtown San Diego, is blessed with pedestrian bridges over canyons and views of San Diego Bay that few affluent professionals and first families and their architects could resist. These city blocks are rich in the early 20th-century Modern architecture that Gill pioneered and include the largest concentration of Gill homes built anywhere, on hidden Albatross Street. As the neighborhood grew, other prominent architects, such as William Templeton Johnson, Mead & Requa, and Hazel Wood Waterman, San Diego's first female architect, also designed homes here.
Gill's architecture is strikingly Modern in Bankers Hill, with its spare, cubist arrangements of volumes and shapes, such as flat roofs, arches and pergolas, without surface ornament, with the exception of trailing vines and shadows.
This tour is ADA accessible.
PURCHASE ADVANCE TICKETS
Online HERE
In Person Marston House Museum Shop • 3525 Seventh Avenue
Walk up tickets subject to availability
Seventh Avenue Walking Tour: A Progressive Vision
(Available January through October)
 12:30pm · 45 minutes
$20
TOUR STARTS at the Marston House Museum Shop in the carriage house
What began as a ten-acre, barren enclave owned by George W. Marston is now the shady and secluded 3500 block of Seventh Avenue, a cul-de-sac that is perfect for a one-hour guided walking tour. This tour contains new content inspired by SOHO's celebration called Irving Gill: Progress & Poetry in Architecture. The Marston House Museum & Gardens is one of about ten homes on the street, built between 1905 and 1913. Many were designed by Gill, when he was a partner in Hebbard & Gill, and they illustrate his design progression from English Arts & Crafts to Prairie Style to his ultimate triumph, cubistic Early Modernism-all in the space of two years, 1905 and 1906.
Marston was San Diego's most prominent leader of the Progressive Movement. He, Gill, and other Progressives championed civil rights for African and Mexican Americans, women's suffrage, child labor laws, food and drug safety measures, while they opposed corruption, alcohol and vice. Gill translated Progressive values of good health through fresh air and contact with nature, cleanliness and sanitation, and incorporated labor saving devices into his architecture, including the Marston House.
This tour is ADA accessible.
PURCHASE ADVANCE TICKETS
Online HERE
In Person Marston House Museum Shop • 3525 Seventh Avenue
Walk up tickets subject to availability
Marston House Garden Tour (Available March through October)
 1:30pm · 45 minutes
$20
TOUR STARTS at the Marston House Museum Shop in the carriage house
With its uniquely California interpretation of the English Romantic and Arts & Crafts period landscape designs, this tour is a must for garden lovers. The garden tour takes you on an easy walk through two and a half acres of the estate beginning with the first plantings and landscape plan by nationally recognized landscape architect Samuel Parsons, Jr., and George Cooke in 1905 to the 1928 introduction of a formal garden.
Several portions of the garden tour are not wheelchair accessible.
PURCHASE ADVANCE TICKETS
Online HERE
In Person Marston House Museum Shop • 3525 Seventh Avenue
Walk up tickets subject to availability
The Marston House: Architectural Details of Master Architects
Hebbard & Gill (Available January through October)
 2:30pm · 90 minutes
$20
TOUR STARTS at the Marston House Museum Shop in the carriage house
Take a walk on the architectural side with a 90-minute guided tour of the 1905 Marston House Museum inside and out. The San Diego firm of Hebbard & Gill designed the inviting English Arts & Crafts mansion with fluid indoor-outdoor connections. Irving Gill, who soon became San Diego's pioneering Modernist, created many of its design features and innovative conveniences. This tour was curated for SOHO by Erik Hanson, a leading authority on Gill and contributor to the book Irving Gill and the Architecture of Reform by Thomas S. Hines. The story begins at the carriage house for the estate (now SOHO's Marston House Museum Shop), then circles around the house in its Balboa Park and formal garden setting. Inside and out, architectural and construction details and period materials are highlighted, and include the Marston family's public and private rooms. Managed by SOHO for the City of San Diego, this property is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The museum is wheelchair accessible on the first floor only; several exterior portions of the tour are not wheelchair accessible.
PURCHASE ADVANCE TICKETS
Online HERE
In Person Marston House Museum Shop • 3525 Seventh Avenue
Walk up tickets subject to availability
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MARSTON HOUSE MUSEUM & GARDENS
3525 Seventh Avenue, San Diego 92103
(619) 297-9327
Tours
Third Sunday Tours
Hours of Operations · Admission
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School Group Tours (K-12)
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Film & Photography Permits
Wedding & Venue Rental
The Marstons: A California Story
History Series
Exhibits
Online Exhibits
Online Jigsaw Puzzles
Coloring Pages
Read more about the Marston House
In the News
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