
Some details of Hampton Hall, a Tudor apartment building in Oakland designed by H. G. Hodgkins.

















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Some details of Hampton Hall, a Tudor apartment building in Oakland designed by H. G. Hodgkins.


















Views of the roof of Hampton Hall, a large Tudor apartment building in Oakland designed by H. G. Hodgkins. We also have views of the entrance and courtyard, the lobby, and the front and a perspective view.











Hampton Hall is a grand Tudor apartment palace in Oakland designed by the Chicago architect H. G. Hodgkins.

A while ago one of the residents mentioned to old Pa Pitt that the long canopy that usually leads from the courtyard entrance to the street had come down for work, which—our correspondent pointed out—would make some of the previously hidden details accessible to a camera. Here, from about two and a half years ago, is how the canopy usually looks:

And here is the courtyard without the canopy:



Father Pitt ended up spending an hour or more taking pictures all over the building, and since he has so many pictures, he will split them into multiple articles to avoid wearying his visitors. Today we see the courtyard and the main entrance.











We have seen this Tudor palace before, but there is no reason we should not see it again, with some different details this time.


The entrance lobby. The interior is filled with richly colored tiles, some with decorative figures like this griffin.



According to a city architectural inventory (PDF), Hampton Hall was built in 1928, and the architect was H. G. Hodgkins, who seems to have been based in Chicago, to judge by listings in Chicago trade magazines that show up in a Google Books search.
The interior includes quite a bit of Nemadji tile, and old Pa Pitt had never heard of Nemadji tile until he found this page on Hampton Hall from a site of Historic U. S. Tile Installations. The exterior is fairy-tale Tudor, designed to make apartment dwellers feel as though they were great lords of Queen Elizabeth’s time.

The entrance is flanked by bears holding shields, as bears are wont to do.








There are two apartment buildings called King Edward in Oakland (plus a small “annex” on Melwood Avenue). The more visible one, the King Edward Apartments on Craig Street at Bayard, was built in 1929. The original King Edward, built in 1914, is behind on Melwood Avenue at Bayard Street. It seems much more staid than its larger neighbor, until we look closer and discover that it is festooned with these grotesque faces.







Addendum: The architect was H. G. Hodgkins, who also designed Hampton Hall, another Merrie England fantasy.