Camellia Courtyard, a project of architect Glenn Bruno, is the antithesis of a strip mall. It was one of the first corners of Chico that endeared me to this place when I came here 11 years ago. There is a seamless blending of buildings and landscaping that you see in few other places in Chico. CARD's Community Center is another good example.

If our suburbs looked more like Camellia Courtyard, we wouldn't object to them so much.

Bruno also designed Bidwell Perk.

Bruno is one of the 10 local architects whose work was featured in an architecture exhibit at Gallery 1078 as part of the ongoing Artoberfest. This is the second of a two-part post that includes one photo representing each of the architects' work.

Thomson & Hendricks, Inc. is the designer of the Catalyst Women's Domestic Violence  Shelter, at the south end of Ivy Street in the Barber neighborhood. The building is still under  construction. The parking lot next to it was fenced off, so it was hard to get a photo that does justice to how it looks.
 
The firm also designed the building that contains the City Hall meeting room and the Chico branch of Butte County Library.

Laurie Norton of Norton Construction Co. was gracious enough to show me around the house he built 12 years ago on what was one of the rare remaining vacant lots on Chico's east side, just south of Bidwell Park. Most of the neighborhood has houses from the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s. Whenever I had walked by the Norton home, I had assumed it was an older home that had been remodeled, as its architectural style is a good fit with the surrounding homes.

Norton's home was designed by his brother-in-law, Tom Norlie, the architect for several houses in Chico and the surrounding area. The 2,000-square-foot house has bedrooms, laundry facilities and office space on the ground floor and a huge room that includes a living room, kitchen and dining area on the second floor. Norton built the "green" (as in energy-efficient ) house on Mulberry Street.

Wittmeier Ford on Forest Avenue in southeast Chico was designed by Larry Coffman, whose other projects include Chico Volkswagen and the Enloe Outpatient Center. The complex is in Big Boxland, but, refreshingly, it's not big and boxy. What I also like about the design is that it did not succumb to the retro-mania that has swept the country in the last two decades. It's a striking design, yet it manages to avoid overwhelming the landscape.  This is one of my favorite buildings in this part of town, although there are a few on Skyway at the southeast edge of Chico that I also  admire.

Griffith & Associates did the remodeling work at Esplanade Professional Offices, a mid 20th-century building that now sits in front of the new Enloe Medical Center parking garage.

The firm also designed Chico Fire Station Five, which now sits in the middle of a roundabout, and the expansion of the  Glenn County Courthouse in Willows.