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In 1947, at the urging of magazine writer Jean Murray Bangs, the editor of House Beautiful, Elizabeth Gordon, commissioned Maynard Parker to photograph major houses by Greene and Greene, including the Charles M. Pratt house in Ojai. Parker's commission anticipated the award that the Greenes would receive from the Southern California chapter of the American Institute of Architects in March 1948, as well as an article by Bangs that would appear in House Beautiful in 1950.

When Parker was photographing the Greenes' work, Bangs' husband, architect Harwell Hamilton Harris, was designing a house in Ojai for Clarence H. Wyle. By then, Bangs had also announced that she was writing a book on the Greenes (it remained unpublished), and she and her husband had become friendly with Henry Greene. According to recently discovered correspondence, the elderly Henry Greene frequently visited the Wyle job site with the Harrises while the house was under construction. Parker was soon commissioned to photograph that house as well, giving him the opportunity to interpret Harris' design for a country house in Ojai as influenced by the Greenes' nearby house for the Pratts nearly forty years earlier.