I Took My Family to Disneyland, and Ended Up Down an Arts and Crafts Rabbit Hole

A few weeks ago, it was spring break for my kids, so my husband and I took them to Disneyland and joined up with my college friend Dave and his family. This detail is important because it is only because of Dave that we ended up staying overnight in a hotel at Disneyland—a first for me—and thus led to my ultimate discovery of the insane decor situation at the Grand Californian Hotel.

My family actually stayed at the Pixar Place Hotel, the cheapest of the Disney resorts, which is across the street from the Grand Californian, the most expensive of the Disney resorts. The latter is where Dave’s family stayed, because I guess Dave is rich and, I am afraid, he, whom I’ve known for nearly 30 years now, based on evidence I witnessed in person, may actually be a Disney Adult.

When I first entered Dave’s hotel, it was very clear to me that its architect(s) had been to the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, North Carolina. For the uninitiated, the Grove Park Inn is a historic hotel built in 1913 in the Blue Ridge Mountains in the Arts and Crafts style, and it was outfitted in furniture, tableware, and whatnot by Roycroft, an Arts and Crafts firm based in East Aurora, New York, founded by writer Elbert Hubbard.

The Arts and Crafts movement is a broad term used internationally for artistic/design movements in reaction to the Industrial Revolution, when everyone got really into having everything handmade again and romanticized the labor of craft. I think technically it started in England in the late 19th century, and then cropped up in the United States at the turn of the century. Within the U.S., it has different ‘factions,’ if you will. There’s East Coast Arts and Crafts firms like Stickley or Roycroft furniture and objects, Tiffany Studios glass and lighting, and then there’s West Coast Arts and Crafts architects and designers like Greene and Greene—the brothers considered responsible for California bungalows—and Bay Area architect Bernard Maybeck. There’s also Frank Lloyd Wright in the Midwest, whose "Prairie Style" architecture straddles both Arts and Crafts and Modernism. He and Greene and Greene had a real hard-on for Japanese aesthetics, which also feature prominently in decorative arts during this time period, but I’m afraid that is about as detailed a history lesson as we have time for here because more urgently is the matter of Disneyland.