At the time color film was reserved for a very small part of the population. This shows the Senator and his wife enjoying the front porch. Note at the end, the kitchen area is shown with the current Skylight. The Skylight was extremely advanced technology at the time.
Contemporaries noted Ms. Mitchell’s clothes, jewelry, stationery, ink and bookbindings all were green. In her novel “The White Stone” one of her characters always wears green and explains the reasons for doing so.
The HABS history puts it more simply: The main color accent was green, a special color in Chinese folklore. Mrs. Young was also a devotee of green — her clothes, ink, stationery, jewelry and book bindings, all being green.
Ruth Comfort Young in this film shows her devotion to her color. Dressed head to toe in green, from her hat to the hem to her shoes, she wears the color she believed held special merit in Chinese folklore. For Ruth, green was never just fashion, it was ink and paper and book cloth and the accent wall of the pagoda home she dreamed up after The Sweetmeat Game, a daily reminder of Los Gatos hills, self-reliance and the good luck she cultivated around her.
While the house was repainted in red do to the former resident, we hope to return it to the former vision of the Youngs as shown in this video. We hope to return the roof to its original red.