Updated: October 6, 2006
 n 1894, Elbert Hubbard founded an arts community named Roycroft (The King’s House) in East Aurora, New York. A former soap salesman, Hubbard enjoyed writing; he started Roycroft with a single printing shop. Later, the Roycroft community would produce leather, metal, furniture, and other hand-made products. The community became so popular that Hubbard opened a hotel named the Roycroft Inn. Frank Miller and his wife Isabella visited Hubbard's Inn in 1902, before the Mission Inn opened.
Frank Miller chose Roycroft and other similar furniture to fill his own hotel. Typically made of oak, such furniture was plain and simple compared to the ornate styles of the Victorian era. This style, known as Arts and Crafts, found its origins in Great Britain. Many similarities exist between Arts and Crafts and the Mission Revival style promoted by Frank Miller.
Miller and Hubbard became great friends. Hubbard and his wife visited Riverside, and Hubbard ended up writing two small booklets about the Mission Inn and producing them at his print shop: The Days of Peace and Rest at The Glenwood By Those Who Know and Music at Meal Times. The former (Hubbard, 1907) includes a letter from former Stanford University President David Starr Jordan, who wrote the following to Frank Miller in 1905:
It has been left to you, Frank Miller, a genuine Californian,
to dream of the hotel that ought to be, to turn your ideal into plaster
and stone, and give us in mountain-belted Riverside the
one hotel which a Californian can recognize as his own (p.6).
In Music at Meals, Hubbard argues that music is not appropriate for meal-time and states that “ Meal-time at the Mission Inn is beautiful, restful and peaceful.” In 1915, on the way to Europe, Hubbard and his wife were among the thirteen hundred passengers who died when a German torpedo struck the RMS Lusitania ocean liner.
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