• School
• J. B. Elston house
• Hillside Club building
• Isaac Flagg studio
• J. H. Hopps house
• Telegraph Hill Neighborhood house
• William Rees house
• San Mateo Polo Club building, San Mateo Realty Investment Company
• Charles Josselyn house
• F. M. French house
• Abbreviations

(Cardwell 1977: 241).

Location and condition unknown (Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 228).

Office records indicate plans and specifications of Boke house duplicated (Cardwell 1977: 241).

Built using plans and specifications of the 1902 Boke house in Berkeley (Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 228).

The scheme for the [Hillside Club] building is the most intriguing of all Maybeck's designs for small clubs... Maybeck gave special attention to the design in order to achieve innovative spatial, acoustical, and lighting effects... A grid system of girders and joists, hung on the columns, supported the floor and took the tension loads imparted from the cantilevered trusses through iron tie rods placed in exterior curtain walls of board and batten construction (Note 5: The Faculty Club and the Unitarian Church were other experiments in the separation of compressive and tensile forces in a structural frame.)(Cardwell 1977: 90-91).

Early in the morning of April 18, 1906, San Francisco citizens were abruptly awakened by toppling chimneys and smashing crockery. Even persons in the suburban areas were aware of the severity of the earthquake, but no one, including the residents of the city who experienced the strongest shocks, could have known the serious consequent events that would mark the day forever in the history of San Francisco. Maybeck did not make his way by ferry from Berkeley to San Francisco that day. Those who did were stranded by the fire which soon swept the waterfront and business districts, destroying five hundred and twelve blocks in the three days it raged and isolating San Francisco from the eastern shores of the Bay. Anticipating the aftershocks that follow such a quake and wanting either to check buildings he had designed or the Hillside Clubhouse which was under construction, Maybeck stayed close to home. Even had he gone to San Francisco, his presence in the city would have made little difference to the preservation of his office drawings. The destruction of the city was so rapid and so complete that even its most vital records were destroyed, and Maybeck's office in Sansome Street was in the very heart of the most heavily devastated area (Cardwell 1977: 93).

Although most of Maybeck's domestic work prior to the earthquake has been associated with German, Swiss, and English medieval vernacular forms, the fascination he felt for the plastic modeling of volumes and spaces as seen in the Hillside Club had previously found expression in the neo-baroque details of the 1904 San Jose residence of Howard B. Gates (Cardwell 1977: 96).

Although he had little influence on the physical outcome of the campus [of the University of California, Berkeley], Maybeck's activities with the Hillside Club were effective in the development of the north campus community. Other members of the club were also strong spokesmen for neighborhood planning, but Maybeck gave practical demonstrations through his buildings. In addition, the small pamphlet given to prospective residents of the area, which was reprinted in the 1906-07 Club Bulletin, appears to have been prepared by Maybeck. Its eight pages, unsigned, are illustrated with a dozen of his sketches, the text even repeating the phrasing of his writing:

With neighborhood cooperation the roadside banks, terraces, etc., can be planted systematically in blocks instead of lots,--not fifty feet of pink geraniums, twenty-five of nasturtiums, fifty of purple verbena, but long restful lines, big, quiet masses,--here a roadside of grey olive topped with purple plum, there a line of willows dipped in flame of ivy covered walls,--long avenues of trees with houses back from roads, hidden behind foregounds of shrubbery...Grass on a hillside looks bare; the same strength and water put on trees and bushes will be more effective. (Note 2: Hillside Club pamphlet. Original copies bear no title, date nor publisher's imprint. They are bound with hand sewing and were most likely produced by members of the club as a project.)

The message of the pamphlet was simple--it urged residents motivated to leave the city to work instead for its maintenance and enhancement. It recommended countour planning of roads and lot subdivisions, coordinated planting of trees and street embankments, and houses shaped and pigmented to blend with the natural landscape. Maybeck's drawings of an ideal neighborhood show watercourses turned into public parks; streets ascend the hills with gentle curves and gradients, forming observation terraces at their switchbacks; houses paralleling the contours of the land and varying in set-back lines, are surrounded by informal gardens. In the manner prescribed by the Hillside Club Bulletin, Maybeck designed Rose Walk as a public thoroughfare in a 1912 development of the property of W. W. Underhill. Rose Walk connects a portion of the hillside area with a street which is serviced with public transportation; private walks to residences blend with the public way "in an immense garden with nothing to show that it is not all one owned by each." (Note 3: Ibid.)

Bernard Maybeck, pen and ink illustration for Hillside Club booklet. The text reads: "Build around the hill on contour lines or step the house up against the hill, one story above and back of the other (Cardwell 1977: 189-91)."

The last of the small clubhouses that Maybeck designed during his first decade of practice was the 1906 Hillside Club in Berkeley. Since the club was founded partly to popularize Maybeck's architectural recommendations for materials, structure, and siting, the design was, appropriately, an embodiment of Maybeck's innovative ideas. The newspaper editor Frank Morton Todd wrote that Maybeck said of the club: "This is an organization of neighbors who like one another and wish to have a sort of common home for the hours of their meeting together. It must feel that way!" Todd admired the way the "naked timbers were braced and tied together in the handsomest and most powerful structural forms."¹¹ He considered such "open timbering" to be Californian and added that the clubhouse was "as intimate and stable and homey as an old stump."

The building was compact, with its parts fused into a longitudinally symmetrical plan that ran parallel to Cedar Street and was composed of separate masses, each with its own gable roof. The main block of the building contained the meeting hall, with a central nave, a transept, side aisles, and triforium. Again the structural frame was expressed on the inside and the outside. The high-peaked ceiling with king posts supporting the ridge beam defined a Gothic space. The only wood used was redwood, cut and treated differently to produce various tones; only the casements were painted. The entire vocabulary of redwood was used, including shingles, rough-split barn shakes, boards and battens, heavy timbers, and small sticks for trellises. A culminating work for this period of Maybeck's practice and a landmark of the Berkeley Arts and Crafts movement, the clubhouse burned in the 1923 fire (Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 69-73, 228).

These three houses [Flagg houses 1-3] are variations on the Swiss Chalet theme. 1200 is perhaps the most interesting for its combination of board-and-batten with shingle siding and elegant eave brackets. 1208 was originally a one-story library-study, and 1210, built for a daughter, is a variation with a pronounced vertical emphasis (Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 253).

Maybeck had a practical reason for introducing color into the design of the Flagg studio. Its primary framing and trim members were redwood, but all of the secondary framing members were fir. In previous houses the ceiling materials had been all redwood and therefore had no contrast in color. When combining the redwood and fir of the studio, Maybeck selected stains to accent their differing grains and hues.

His aesthetic reason for his choice of colors was based on the fact that Professor Flagg was a Classics scholar. Maybeck knew from reading Der Stil by Gottfried Semper that the classical Greek structures were rich in polychrome ornamentation, and he chose color as a symbol of Professor Flagg's academic field. It is more than coincidental to find a similarity between Maybeck's color choices and Semper's plates illustrating the conjectural decorative painting of the Temple of Theseus at Athens. Several years later Maybeck drew a frontispiece for a publication of a Greek play entitled Circe which Isaac Flagg had written (Note 3: Isaac Flagg, Circe (Berkeley and Ukiah: 1915), printed by Roycrofters, East Aurora, N.Y.). In his drawing Maybeck depicts Grecian structures in a wide range of hues (Cardwell 1977: 90).

Color became a strong feature in Maybeck's design of the Isaac Flagg Studio (1906). It soon became one of the distinctive elements of many of his buildings. Other than the moss green and earth red paints used on window sash, in the first ten years of his work color is little evidenced. The Faculty Club had walls covered with a green-gold burlap fastened with gilded half-round moldings. In Hearst Hall, Maybeck had installed red and blue lights to cast colored tones into shadowy recesses. But generally, plain, unstained woods provided the architectural background and color accents had been achieved by means of furnishings--tapestries in Hearst Hall and Wyntoon, oriental carpets and window hangings in the smaller buildings.

The Flagg studio, of chalet character, was originally a one-and-one-half-storied structure set in the garden of the large house Maybeck had built for Professor Flagg in 1901. It has since been enlarged to two full stories. The studio is framed by trussed redwood beams which rest on square eight-inch posts. Trusses and end walls support three six-by-six subbeams spanning the length of the room. On these are laid two-by-two purlins which carry the ceiling. The east wall has panels of dark red plush set between flush fronted cabinets. A clinker brick fireplace on the west is surrounded by a wall of redwood casework and on the north and south continuous casement sash fills large openings. The entire room can be softly illuminated by indirect lighting units placed on top of the cases.

The beams of the studio are stencilled in gilt with geometrical patterns and carry purlins stained a Prussian blue. Gold purlins in the stairhall harmonize with dove gray woodwork, while Turkey red purlins of the dining room contrast with gray-green fir walls. The purlins penetrate the exterior walls and support the overhanging second story. On the exterior they are stained moss green with their exposed butt ends painted red-orange. The wall of redwood shingles and the redwood struts supporting the large overhangs were left untreated to age to blackish-brown tones. It is not surprising to find that Maybeck used a non-conventional framing system, nor that untreated redwood boards form bookshelves and flush case fronts. However, wooden structural members colored bright red and dark blue, ceilings of gold, and walls of plush do seem unexpected details for the simple home (Cardwell 1977: 88-89).

There is much symbolism in all of Maybeck's work. From the obvious device of the dragon mark of his father's craft to the choice of materials, symbolism of some form exists in most of his work. (Note 10: The dragon device was used in Wyntoon, the Faculty Club, Outdoor Art Club, Flagg studio, Owens house, Tufts house (San Rafael), Kennedy studio, and the Chamberlain studio among others (Cardwell 1977: 125; Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 228).

Additions, 1925 (Cardwell 1977: 241).

Maybeck's most picturesque chalets were built in 1906 for J. H. Hopps in Ross and in 1907 for Albert Schneider in Berkeley. Hopps was a lumber baron who owned a large parcel of rolling, oak-studded land in Marin County where, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the new suburban communities of San Anselmo and Ross grew up near the old centers of San Rafael and Mill Valley. These "scenic spots" (as they were often called) attracted wealthy residents because of their accessibility to San Francisco by rail and ferry lines.

Following his own advice for the siting of hillside houses, Maybeck placed the Hopps house (plate 38) parallel to the hill that rises above it on one side and falls away into a valley on the other. Although some grading must have been done to make a pad for the house, it seems to grow out of its setting. The landscape must have been wild indeed when the house was built, for even now, after decades of development on the neighboring hills, manmade structures do not intrude on the views from the house. It was perfect chalet country. The two-story house, with walls clad in three-foot-long redwood shakes (typically used on barns) above a stone base, is not as large as the spread of its roof suggests. In 1925 Maybeck designed an addition to it (plates 39, 40), which contained a grand room for entertaining and a lavatory, on the hillside above the main house. A bridge joins the addition to the main house and forms an ell that protects a terrace and stone pathways leading up and down the slope.

Although the design of the hillside circulation and landscaping is so perfectly integrated with the building that Maybeck's authorship of it seems certain, no drawings exist to verify this supposition. Maybeck certainly considered buildings and their landscaped settings to be one design problem, but drawings of landscape plans by his hand are rare. Most of the evidence on paper for his interest in landscaping exists in his sketches for buildings (many of them unbuilt) that incorporate landscaping; his renderings go well beyond the conventional "entourage" planting traditionally added to give the illusion of a mature setting.

The entrance to Grayoaks, as the Hopps house was called, is on the side of the house at a midpoint in the upward slope (plate 42); the door opens onto a stair landing that commands a view of the living room across the front of the house (plate 43). The linear quality of the living room's redwood board-and-batten walls, with a band of plaster above, contrasts with the massive fireplace mantel, with its polished redwood shelf supported on corbels and its five-foot-tall opening for the hearth (plate 44). The heavy, rough-sawn boxed beams with visible blade marks add to the primitive quality of the room. Like many of the great living rooms that Maybeck designed in the course of his career, the room demonstrates his talent for using traditional materials in ways that heightened their emotional impact.

The rest of the main floor, encompassing the dining room and the kitchen, is raised a few steps above the living-room level. Even though the Hopps family had servants and a Chinese butler, Maybeck introduced a pass-through from the kitchen to the dining room that reflected his interest in the modern, servantless house (an interest that he later pursued in other designs). Both the kitchen and the dining room have been remodeled, but the latter still commands a magical view of the wooded canyon, seen through a bank of openings that originally had window sash hinged at the top to permit opening the end of the room to the out-of-doors.

From the entrance landing the stairway continues along the side of the house to the upper-floor hall, which serves the four bedrooms (plates 45, 46). As is typical of Maybeck's houses, they are more comfortable than grand. A well-proportioned master bedroom is above the living room at the front of the house, two smaller bedrooms are along the southeastern side, and another bedroom is in the back. A subtle and sensitive aspect of this and other Maybeck houses is the size and character of the fenestration, which changes from room to room. The variation is most noticeable in the upstairs rooms, where the simple plaster walls and ceilings do not distract attention from the windows. In rooms with a horizontalo emphasis, the casement windows have horizontal divisions, which interfere less with the view. In smaller rooms, where less wall space exists, the windows have vertical panes and more of them (Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 48-53, 50-56, 57, 59, 228).

One of Bernard Maybeck's many successful Marin homes is on Winding Way near Canyon Road, Ross. Built in the "West Coast Shingle Style" (in which Maybeck did some of his best work), the redwood house was designed and built in 1905 for J. H. Hopps. Called Grey Oaks, it lives up to its pastoral image most successfully, blending into the landscape until it is nearly hidden from view--a camouflage only partially undermined by the sharp, white trim that gives the house a distinctive charm (Olmsted and Watkins 1969: 230).

Bernard Maybeck, addits. 1913 and 1928. Reblt. 1940s; John Kelly.

This neighborhood association was founded by Alice Griffith, a pioneer figure in San Francisco social work. Now remodeled into shops, offices, and apartments, the building has an interior court with balcony access to the second floor. Its most recent addition, designed by AGORA, came in the last several years Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 57).

An historic neighborhood center founded by Alice Griffith, a pioneering social worker, the building's alpine chalet style was often used by Maybeck. The many alterations of form and use have preserved the attractive courtyard (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992:50; Cardwell 1977: 241).

Additions by Maybeck, 1913 and 1928 (Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 229).

At the foot of Telegraph Hill is the rambling frame structure formerly occupied by the Telegraph Hill Neighborhood Association. This compound, at 1736 Stockton Street, was begun in 1907, when Bernard Maybeck was commissioned to design a building to house a dispensary, club room, and flats for the nurses and settlement workers of the Association.

The building was enlarged in 1909, 1913, and 1928. It is far from certain that Maybeck had anything to do with the additions, but they were executed in a compatible style, and it is entirely possible that he did draw the plans. Though the Neighborhood Association moved to new quarters in 1954, the building's new owner has preserved its integrity (Olmsted and Watkins 1969: 59).

The William Rees house (1906) on La Loma Avenue in Berkeley, is said to be a copy of a chalet model the owner had brought back from Switzerland. (Note 10: B. R. Maybeck Photos, "W. Rees," C.E.D. Docs. The Rees house has been published as the work of A. E. Hargraves.) But the corners, detailed of crossed logs as in the Boke house, and the decorative detail of the balcony railings are probably the extent to which the design copied the model. An undefined space of the stairwell can be made into an entry by closing large sliding doors placed at right angles to one another, thereby separating it from the dining and living rooms. This singular and innovative plan arrangement is not to be found in any chalet. In addition, the stairway rises in an easy flight to an enlarged mid-landing which serves as a small sitting room with a view of the San Francisco Bay. The house is built on a steep and convoluted piece of property. Maybeck's design gained direct ground access at several levels, an attribute which a later owner took advantage of to convert the house into three independent living units. Like the Schneider house, it has a rich compositon of balconies, large eaves, and uneven gabled roofs unlike conventional chalets.

Maybeck participated with developers or contractors in promotional designs throughout his career, and this may have been the situation with the Rees construction. There are no office drawings for this project, and it seems likely that Maybeck provided limited services and did the work outside of his regular San Francisco office routine. Remaining records of this type of collaboration are scanty; some such projects are no doubt unidentified and difficult to document as Maybeck's (Cardwell 1977: 105, 241).

Designed for A. E. Hargreaves, builder (Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 227).

nm(Cardwell 1977: 246).

Location and condition unknown (Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 236).

A very large residence with many classical features including a columned courtyard, the Josselyn house was designed by the firm of Maybeck, Howard and White during the short time after the San Francisco earthquake that the firm existed. Maybeck's specific contribution to the design is not known although elements of the wood work recall some of his earlier work and classical details were later employed by him in some of his larger structures (Cardwell 1977: 93,246).

The years 1906 through 1910 were very productive ones for Maybeck. Although the 1906 earthquake and fire, which destroyed so much of San Francisco, caused much less damage in residential areas of the East Bay, an area-wide building boom followed that brought good times to local architects. After the April disaster so much work came into the San Francisco office Maybeck had opened in 1902 with Mark White that he formed another firm--called Maybeck, Howard, and White--with his other brother-in-law, John White, and George Howard. The new firm had temporary offices at 821 Eddy Street, near the Civic Center, and lasted fifteen months. At the end of 1907 the firm split up, and Maybeck and Mark White returned to their former, earthquake-damaged office at 35 Montgomery Street, which by then had been renovated.

One 1907 project by Maybeck, Howard, and White was a grand Mediterranean villa for Charles Josselyn in Woodside (plate 95). Because the peninsula south of San Francisco was less plagued by fog than the city it had become a favorite place for the wealthy to build summer homes; later, year-round country villas were built there. Woodside was farther south than the centers of early development in Burlingame and Atherton, and it had more open countryside, with oak trees on rolling hills and redwood groves in canyons. The Josselyn house enjoyed both kinds of scenery in a setting that might have been painted by William Keith.

Stripped of its architectural finery, this Italianesque villa could have been a California ranch house. The front court of the H-shaped plan is enclosed by an Ionic colonnade. The great gable roofs--their broad overhangs supported on multiple shaped-wood brackets spring from rough stuccoed walls--dominate the composition (plate 96). The formality of the romantically overscaled Baroque broken pediments, the balconies with classical railings, and the columns with ornate Ionic capitals completes a composition that begins in a series of stepped terraces that raise the front of the house above ground level. Sited at the edge of a meadow against a backdrop of somber redwoods, this Tuscan farmhouse transformed into a grand villa has a sunny openness to the south and a brooding darkness to the north. The mood it conveys, one often rendered by contemporary California landscape painters, is of a perpetual golden afternoon (Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 113-14, 168, 236).

(Cardwell 1977: 242).

(Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 229).

Abbreviations