1476 Greenwood, Berkeley

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Today we feature an interesting home designed by Bernard Maybeck in 1907. The house was built for Frances Gregory whose brother Warren was a well-respected lawyer and professor at Berkeley. Warren and his wife Sadie owned a house down the street which was designed by John Galen Howard, and Sadie would also later commission William Wurster to design the famous Gregory Farmhouse in the Santa Cruz mountains.

The Frances Gregory house shares a certain simplicity with the Gregory Farmhouse and its Third Bay successors that would come so many years later. It is a basic saltbox form that is remarkably devoid of ornamentation (especially considering some of the other work that Maybeck was producing at the time). Its lack of overhanging eaves and orderly arrangements of windows make it appear very modern when contrasted with the Noyes house next door at 1486 (also by John Galen Howard) which looks much more in keeping with Maybeck’s other work of the period. There is also a good deal less interior woodwork than is often seen in Maybeck homes. Though the redwood paneling in the public rooms covers much of the wall, the ceilings are bare plaster.

690 Panoramic, Oakland

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This late 60s mid-century looks pretty conventional from the exterior with its cross gabled roof and prominent garage, but inside the house is quite surprising. The gables of the home are filled with glass, and through them pour great quantities of light and impressive views. The living room and the loft above it benefit most from this arrangement which together with the interesting fireplace, serpentine staircase, and exposed structure make for some very compelling spaces.

2900 Derby, Berkeley

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This lovely Julia Morgan craftsman has had an interesting life. The home was originally built at 2819 Garber Street for Alma Galbraith, a Latin teacher at Oakland High School. It is one of Morgan’s earliest surviving commissions having been constructed only a few years after she returned from completing her education at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1902. In 1913 it was home to Walter Steilberg who was Julia Morgan’s chief draftsman for many years and an accomplished designer in his own right. Then in 1920 the home was moved to its current location on Derby.

The house is designed very much in the First Bay Region style championed by Morgan’s mentor Bernard Maybeck. Redwood shingles cloak the exterior while the interior gets a more refined vertical redwood paneling. There is a great inglenook as well as numerous built-ins, divided light windows and inlaid floors – well worth a visit while it is on the market.

2750 Shasta, Berkeley

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Today we feature a nice woodsy Bay Region mid-century designed by Elizabeth Witkin. Witkin was a Berkeley native who attended the architecture school at UC Berkeley at a time when it was still quite unusual for a woman to do so. Bay Region modernism was on the rise at Berkeley in that moment and many of her classmates including John Funk and Henry Hill went on to become well-known residential designers. Witkin was less prolific so it is a real treat to see this particular home in such great shape.

The home appears almost entirely original with loads of clear redwood paneling inside and out. The interesting geometries of the interior spaces are enhanced by numerous built-ins and thoughtfully located fenestration. Outside there is an amazing specimen garden featuring a collection of native plants that were acquired over a period of many years by the previous owners.

55 Sea View, Piedmont

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Just in time for the weekend – a massive Piedmont Tudor estate designed by Albert Farr in 1925. Farr was responsible for some of the grandest homes in the East Bay and this particular example is no exception. At nearly 10,000 SF the house is enormous even by today’s standards. It was built in the midst of the roaring 20s for Gerald and Marian Trayner who were heirs to a fortune amassed by the California company that created the black olive as we know it today and made it a familiar part of the American diet.

The home is impressive not only for its size, but also for its great state of preservation. All too frequently homes at this end of the price spectrum suffer from excessive renovation and the resulting loss of original fabric, but this home retains many of its great original details including large quantities of custom woodwork and plaster. It is an awesome witness to the days before the great depression when money flowed freely and period revival architecture was coming into its own.

1129 Euclid, Berkeley

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This unusual home was built in 1922 but it appears to have been entirely reimagined sometime in the middle of the last century. Nearly all vestiges of the original home are gone except for the occasional hint and what remains is a rather interesting mid-century. It is full of wood paneling and built-ins as well as large glazed openings and wood soffits – quite a thorough transformation.

4094 Sacramento, Concord

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It has unfortunately been a while since we have had a really well-preserved East Bay Eichler to share, so we have had to content ourselves with looking longingly across the bay to pricier Eichler pastures; but that all changes today with a new listing from one of the Concord tracts. Concord is revered as home to the most inexpensive Eichlers in the Bay Area so it is quite exciting to find a home that is in such great original condition at such a reasonable price.

The home, a relatively unusual model designed by A Quincy Jones, appears to have all of its original unpainted mahogany paneling as well as most of its period light globes and exposed brick fireplace. Even the kitchen is almost completely intact which is a huge treat – quite a find after a bit of a dry spell in the East Bay.

605 Wellesley, Kensington

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Today we feature a nice boxy Kensington mid-century with some serious overhangs. The home is anchored on one side by a large mass of masonry at the fireplace. The adjacent wall facing the bay is entirely glazed and the roof structure extends out over the windows in a considerable cantilever. As the house steps down the hill to the bedroom wing it takes the form of a series of interconnected boxes with another sizable roof projection at the end of the bedrooms facing the street. Inside, the separation of space is excellent and the rooms, though not exceptionally large, feel spacious and thoughtful.

683 42nd, Oakland

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A new year is upon us and with the typical dearth of interesting listings that comes with the holidays officially behind us, we at Edificionado are looking forward to exciting things in 2012. And to start it off, we have a nice home to share today – a modest bungalow in the Longfellow neighborhood of Northwest Oakland. At just under 1000 SF the home is cozy even by bungalow standards, but what it lacks in size, it makes up for in detail with loads of great original woodwork. The built-ins in this home are particularly chunky and oversized which one might imagine wouldn’t work in a small house, but somehow combined with all of the divided lights, paneling, and other period embellishments, the scale feels right. And at under $300K, the price might feel right to a lot of prospective buyers too.

3627 Redwood, Oakland

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It’s a little hard to tell from the pictures, but this Redwood Heights Tudor looks to be almost entirely original. It has a great period bathroom as well as an unusual peaked arch motif that is repeated throughout the home and seems to echo the multiple gables at the exterior. As is typical with homes in this style, the embellishment is rather sparse and refined with little or no roof overhang and wrought iron accents.