(b Eastbourne, Sussex, 1863; d Berkeley, CA, 27 March 1933). English architect, active in the USA. He was trained in the offices of several English architects and attended the Royal Academy Schools, London. In 1886 he moved with his older brother, Almeric Coxhead (1862–1928), to Los Angeles, CA, where he established an independent practice. The Coxheads moved to San Francisco four years later and soon formed a partnership that lasted until Almeric’s death. Ernest Coxhead appears to have retained charge of designing. Until the early 1890s the firm specialized in churches; thereafter, most executed projects were for houses in San Francisco and its suburbs. Coxhead’s building schemes of the 1890s were highly inventive, sometimes eccentric, drawing on both the classical tradition in England and contemporary English Arts and Crafts work. He was adept at developing complex, dramatic spatial sequences and creating mannerist plays with form, scale and historical allusions. Like his friend Willis J. Polk, Coxhead excelled in the design both of modest, informal dwellings such as his own house (1893) in San Francisco and of large, elaborate ones such as the Earl House (c. 1895–8; destr. 1957), Los Angeles. Among his most original designs was an unsuccessful entry to the Phoebe Hearst architectural competition for the University of California, Berkeley (1898). Here, grand classical elements are interspersed among others more suggestive of a northern Italian hill town, to form an intricate collage that is a pronounced departure from most planning projects of the period.

• Coxhead, Ernest (Albert)
  • San Francisco, §1: History and urban development
  • Shingle style