The Splendid Disarray of Beauty: The Boys, the Tiles, the Joy of Cathedral Oaks-A Study in Arts and Crafts Community retrieves from obscurity the story of the California artists Frank Ingerson (1879-1968) and George Dennison (1873-1966). In August 1910, they began fifty-five years of love and life together by launching, as their honeymoon project, a freestanding summer art school. Tucked away in the eastern foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, the Cathedral Oaks school was bohemian in lifestyle but rigorously followed the teachings of the dean of American Arts and Crafts design, Arthur Wesley Dow.

After shuttering the school in 1915, Ingerson and Dennison, known among their friends as "the Boys," go on to lead glamorous lives as interior designers in Hollywood and Europe-hobnobbing with Academy Award winners and dining with the Peerage. But eventually, their money runs out, they lose their contacts, and they pass into starlessness. Married in substance one hundred years before California law got up to their speed, they are two of the most fascinating and admirable people you may have never heard of-until now.