Berkeley
Berkeley is a city where the houses still tell you who built them and why. I like to learn a place through its homes, so that's how I show it.
1895 – 1907
The story starts here. In 1895 Bernard Maybeck built a steep-roofed, unpainted redwood house for Charles Keeler, his first Berkeley commission. A few years later, in 1898, neighbors formed the Hillside Club to keep the hills from being graded flat and built over with the wrong kind of houses. It drew on the Arts and Crafts movement, and Maybeck and Keeler were among its members.
That's why North Berkeley and the hills have shingle and redwood houses tucked into the slope instead of a grid of identical lots. Maybeck's 1907 house for UC Berkeley professor J.H. Senger is still there today.
1923
In September 1923 a wildfire came down the north hills toward campus and destroyed roughly 600 homes, Maybeck's own among them. Afterward he began trying unusual materials, including burlap sacks dipped in cement, which clad the house now known as the Sack House. It was an experimental response to fire from an architect who had just watched his own work burn.
1911 – 1927
The style changes. Julia Morgan, who studied under Maybeck, remodeled the Smyth House in 1911 around a core built about 1868, the oldest surviving building in that part of the city. There's Tudor Revival from the 1920s too, like the Berkeley Day Nursery (1927) by Walter Ratcliff Jr. On Claremont, the Berkeley and Oakland border, the Claremont Hotel was completed in 1915, in time for the Panama-Pacific Exposition.
1972
In 1972 the architectural photographer Henry Bowles commissioned Andrew Batey to design a house of glass, steel and redwood in the North Berkeley hills. It could hardly be further from a Maybeck shingle house, and it belongs to the same hills.
My approach
When I show a home here, I want to know who designed it, when it was built, how the neighborhood grew around it, and which details survived. A house makes more sense once you know its story, and that story is part of what you're buying.
History checked against the Berkeley Historical Plaque Project, Hillside Club records, Cal OES, the UC Berkeley news archive and local archives.