In 1913, Chase, a dentist, and his friend Wohlhuter hired Bentley to design side-by-side houses for their families, and Bentley skillfully distilled the classic Prairie Style formula into a small-scale plan. The nearly mirror-image bungalows occupy narrow lots on either side of a shared driveway and stretch away from the street. Nearly every element of their design emphasizes horizontality, from low hipped roofs with deep eaves, light-colored bands of stucco interlaced with windows, and, below the stucco, contrasting bands of dark, horizontal lap-board.
In the hands of a lesser architect, these bungalows might have been mundane, considering their modest size and tiny sites, but Bentley lifted the houses above the ordinary. He gave them five-sided “living porches,” projecting toward the street. He fitted the interiors with built-in cabinetry and banded the upper walls and ceilings with thin cypress moldings, much as Frank Lloyd Wright did, and he made the front rooms—living porch, living room, entrance hall, and dining room—flow into one another, much as Wright organized space in his early interiors. The original leaded windows, with their arrow motif, glaze the living porch of Chase’s cottage. Matching garages stand behind the bungalows.