Born in Ohio and educated at MIT, the Greene brothers designed several of the most distinguished Arts and Crafts houses in the United States, mostly in Pasadena and other towns in southern California. Combining Japanese-inspired wood construction and individually designed and handcrafted furniture and objects for houses that opened into the beautiful California climate, Greene and Greene defined the California bungalow in the early twentieth century. This stained-glass window was designed for the house of the Los Angeles businessman Earle C. Anthony, for whom the brothers had also designed a showroom for his Packard dealership. The mixture of Japanese-inspired line with California flora–here the live oak–was typical of the their design sensibility.

The Greene and Greene papers are spread among three repositories: the Gamble House, the Environmental Design Archives at UC Berkeley, and the Avery Library. Under the aegis of the Gamble House, now a house museum belonging to the University of Southern California, the three repositories cooperated on a "virtual archive" of the three collections.