• J. H. Senger house
• Albert C. Kern house
• Oscar Maurer Photographic Studio building
• Francis E. Gregory house
• Albert Schneider house
• Andrew C. Lawson house
• Dudley Saeltzer house
• J. B. Tufts house (#2)
• Eliza R. Roman house
• P. H. Atkinson house
• Abbreviations

What appears to be the main entrance of this house was actually designed for ceremonial occasions only. The real front door opens directly onto a public sidewalk while the major part of the house turns its back to the street and faces a large private garden (Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 255).

The Senger house combined a shingled exterior with one of stucco and half-timbering with the trim brightly painted in reds and blues creating a curious and somewhat awkward composition in which the portions can even appear to be unrelated structures.

The San Francisco earthquake and fire had created a wide interest in reinforced concrete. The Art Gallery and the Women's Dormitory at Stanford University, pioneering structures of Ernest Ransome, withstood the shock, while masonry structures around them toppled. It seemed logical for this new material to be used in new forms. However, the high cost of steel in California hampered experimental work, especially for residential building. A comparison of the cost of the Lawson house with that of the wood-framed Senger house--one similar in size and built in the same year by Maybeck--shows that reinforced concrete construction was more than double the cost of building in wood (Cardwell 1977: 100).

In the 1907 house for J.H. Senger, a professor of German, Maybeck emphasized Germanic forms ranging from the medieval to the baroque to reflect his client's interests. Its exterior combines shingles and plaster with half-timbering, irregularly related to structural rhythms, which recalls rustic structures of the Rhineland. The design of the house is erratic--steeply pitched gable roofs supported on overly heavy corbeling are interrupted by dormers with broken pediment forms. In spite of awkward combinations, the house is worthy of study for the integration of its interior and garden. Maybeck's early houses often revealed his sensitivity to the nature of the land, but this was generally a contrasting relationship based on the size and placement of the structure on the site. The Gothic house broke sharply from a natural garden with few, if any, transitional elements from one to the other. The Senger house, like that for Lawson, uses a garden with paved terraces, trellises, and secondary structures to complement its interior spaces.

The entry floor level is more than a half-story below the living rooms although it is not separated from them. A short flight of stairs arrives at a landing and vestibule of the music room which has its own formal entrance from the western side of the property. The stairway switches back to land in an ell-shaped combination of living and dining rooms. This equivocal space is dominated by a large concrete fireplace cast in baroque forms and ornamented by ceramic tiles which Senger had purchased on a visit to Germany. Opposite the fireplace, at the end of the dining area, a raised platform designated by Maybeck on the plan as an erker (alcove) functions as a space for informal eating. Large glazed doors can be opened along the entire south wall of the dining room onto a bricked terrace sheltered by a free-standing pergola. The living room extends through glazed doors onto a terrace covered by the second-story. Views from the terrace into the garden, over the city, and across the Bay reveal one strong attraction for building on Berkeley hillside sites (Cardwell 1977:101).

The plan and interior of the Senger house were successful in integrating the living area with the terraces and gardens, revealing Maybeck's sensitivity to the natural surroundings (Cardwell 1977: 102).

Even before the 1923 fire provided irrefutable evidence that houses with wooden exteriors were not an ideal choice for Berkeley, Maybeck had broadened his repertory to include the half-timbered style traditional in northern Europe and England and the masonry tradition of the Mediterranean. The Senger and Lawson houses, both completed in 1907, illustrate his mastery of these dissimilar idioms.

Both shingles and half-timbering are used in the house for Professor J. H. Senger, who taught German at the university and took an active part in Berkeley's musical community. These two aspects of the client's life affected the design of the house mainly in its formal front section (plate 98), where decorative half-timbering alludes to structural forces and to the owner's Teutonic background. The main purpose of this section was to provide a formal setting for the combination living, dining, and music room, which accounts for most of the ground-floor space. That the music room was not intended for everyday use was indicated by the provision of drapery-covered screens, which could close it off from the stairs ascending from the vestibule. These stairs also lead to the back of the house, where the kitchen and other service areas, including what were originally the servants' quarters, are located. As if to indicate the secondary nature of the stree-level entrance on the side of the house, which leads directly to the kitchen and service areas, Maybeck gave it a decorative Gothic surround of wood members painted a bright blue and set flush with the wall (plate 97). He expressed the difference between the public front and the service-oriented back by changing the materials from half-timbering to shingles, and he coupled the Baroque broken pediment with medieval half-timbering in the dormers on the front roof. Maybeck seems to have enjoyed playing in this way with well-known signature elements from different styles, mixing them together here, no doubt, to entertain and shock sophisticated observeres.

The redwood box beams of the ceiling in the main public space have gilded bands along their edges that lighten the effect. Small bare bulbs set in sockets behind the wooden surface of the walls and some of the beams softly light the ceiling. The room has a double axis: one going west-east from the ornate plaster fireplace (plate 99) to the raised platform at the east end, labeled an "erker" (alcove) on the plans. Musicians may have played from this stagelike area to guests seated in the main part of the room. The north-south axis ends in a porch on the south side with access to the garden terrace on the east and with views of the hills and the bay to the west. Enclosed by the L-form of the house, the garden also has a rustic barn or studio on the east side, which helps to frame and shelter it (Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 114-16, 119, 121, 127, 229).

nm (Cardwell 1977: 242).

Location and condition unknown (Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 229).

This building needs no sign saying "studio". Its side elevation is a controlled ramble along the stream (Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 262).

Beautifully sited by the creek and very inviting (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 211).

He exploited this singular approach [a combination of H.H. Richardson's shingle work of the 1880s in the spirit of the English crafts movement in the 1860s, more personal forms, and the combination of forms borrowed from historic styles] in the concrete Maurer studio in Berkeley, 1907, and again in the Randolph School, 1910 (McCoy 1975: 15).

Maybeck had tried out reinforced concrete in 1907 in his Lawson house and Maurer studio in Berkeley, and then had returned to wood construction (McCoy 1975: 71).

Maybeck also produced residential designs with elements based on conjectural reconstructions of Greek and Roman houses. He loosely called their form classic, but this did not preclude his use of Romanesque, Gothic, or even baroque details. And, in the 1920s when other architects also turned to southern European examples for the California house, Maybeck's designs still remained uniquely individualistic. His complete disregard for archeological detail and proper "good taste" in historic style is evident in all of his works. Of course, with the ascendancy of the American Beaux-Arts movement, his mixed use of period prototypes caused his architecture to be labeled "eccentric."

The first construction to reveal Maybeck's conception of Greek or Mediterranean domestic architecture is the Oscar Maurer studio (1907) on LeRoy Avenue in Berkeley. The studio is sited near the bank of Strawberry Creek and faces a large oak tree which grows in the middle of the street. (Members of the Hillside Club had persuaded the city fathers to save the tree by paving around it when grading improvements had threatened its destruction.) Maurer was a portrait photographer and the building designed for him contained a small office and a display gallery in addition to living quarters. The various rooms of the one-story building nestle under low-pitched gabled roofs. Maybeck used changes in the floor level to accommodate the studio to the sloping site, and variations in room heights to add interest to its interior. The changes, clearly expressed on the exterior, create a picturesque silhouette dominated by the horizontal eave lines of the tiled roofs.

To reinforce the classical image of the studio Maybeck used two bits of ornament. One is found in the large window of the gallery which is sheltered by the deep entrance porch. A small wooden Corinthian column in the center of the window is intersected by the plane of the glass so that half of the column and its gilded capital lies outside the room and half within, creating a strong illusion that the gallery is open to the street and its sheltering oak tree. The second, a simplified classical frieze executed in plaster with guttae, but with neither tryglyphs nor metopes, is located as a sill and apron for the office wihndow. The drawings indicate that it was intended to carry an inscription. In addition, the coloring, as in the Flagg studio, is suggestive of Semper's plates on the polychromy of Greek buildings. Walls of gray sanded plaster abut beams stained brown, and purlins colored blue and green contrast with the rose tones of the exposed roof sheathing (Cardwell 1977: 97).

Oscar Maurer, client (Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 229).

A restrained and elegant box whose roof line echoes the slope on which it perches. The handcrafted, somewhat whimsical aspect of the houses up Buena Vista Way is absent here (Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 259;

nm Cardwell 1977: 242).

1476 Greenwood Terrace, Berkeley (Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 229).

Maybeck's largest house in the Swiss Chalet Style with scroll-sawn balconies and broad, gracefully bracketed eaves (Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 264).

Three generations of children have grown up in the Schneider house in Berkeley. A plain table of redwood boards with 4 by 4-inch sanded redwood legs is still in use in the dining room, which is open to the living room and the view of the Bay through its French doors (McCoy 1975: 16).

The descriptions of the Maurer, Lawson, and Senger houses have emphasized the diversity of Maybeck's historical sources, and although he continued to use the Swiss chalet for a model, it too developed into new forms. The earlier chalets of Flagg and Underhill [destroyed in 1923 fire] were single rectangular blocks. But in the Albert Schneider house (1907) there is a shaping of the mass indicative of a more free room arrangement. Maybeck abandoned the rigid structural module of the Boke chalet in favor of conventional framing combined with a simple post and lintel system to span the living areas. Beams supporting the eaves and struts bracing the balconies butt against vertical two-by-eights that are an exterior indication of the building frame. The form does not return to totally articulated parts as in the Keeler and Davis houses, but combines open planning with a robust development of balconies and eaves to enrich the exterior.

On the Schneider house the roof form, short on the uphill side and long on the downhill one, echoes the character of the site. The ridge of its principal gable parallels the level lines of the ground, while a transverse gable over the master bedroom and balcony points west to the Bay. The eaves at the ridge project almost six feet and sweep down in diminishing breadth. The house, however, does not adjust itself to the contours as does the Maurer studio or some of Maybeck's later work; instead, it rises high as a vertical element in the landscape, modified only by the horizontal lines of the balconies and long sweeps of the eaves.

The house is entered by passing through a hilside garden designed by John McLaren, whose fame grew with his development of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. (Note 9: Cf. John McLaren, Gardening in California (San Francisco: A.M. Robertson, 1909). The steep garden path leads to an entrance vestibule which opens directly into the living area. The circulation way from the entry at the south to the stairwell at the north lies between the living room and the dining room and is defined by the free standing columns at one side of the living area. The flow of space from a sheltered terrace outside the dining room through French doors in the west wall of the living room marks a strong visual axis which composes with the one of the north-south circulation. Nine-foot ceilings and simple board and batten walls make the scale of the interior compatible with its bold composition.

The Schneider house sits high on its hillside site to afford views from its many balconies of the Bay and surrounding areas (Cardwell 1977: 103).

The Schneider house is a modest house constructed on a modest budget. The remarkable thing about the plan is its sense of spaciousness, although the main rooms are contained in a roughly rectangular space twenty-five by thirty-five feet. Its ample feeling was developed by Maybeck's skill in relating one volume to another, as well as by his astute placement of voids in the walls that define them. The house, without any arbitrary room arrangements, achieves a dynamic balance of planes and volumes around its axial lines.

Despite its modest dimensions, a sense of spaciousness is achieved through high ceilings and vistas through the rooms. The fireplace is a noteworthy variation of one of Maybeck's basic designs (Cardwell 1977: 104).

In 1906 Albert Schneider, a professor of classics, asked Maybeck to design a chalet for property he owned a few blocks up the hill from the earlier chalet commissioned by his colleague Isaac Flagg. Whether or not Schneider's desire for a Swiss chalet stemmed from the location of his lot on the crest of a hill with fine views toward the bay, or from a liking of the chalet Maybeck had designed for Flagg, or from both, is not known. In any case, Schneider's chalet (plate 47) is more folksy and rustic than the Flagg house and less rugged than the Hopps house. When built, it dominated the hill, and even today, surrounded by other houses, it remains an authoritative presence there.

The cross-gable roof is made asymmetrical by the extension of its western slope to cover a corner room on the south side. The eaves, which extend over the front balcony, are supported by heavy diagonal wooden braces at the corner. Curiously, one beam is laid across the eaves and supported awakwardly by a corner of the balcony railing, as though it had been an afterthought. The reason that Maybeck did not incorporate this side of the roof into the cross gable, as he did on the north side, may be that he wished to increase the wall area on the sunny south side, where bedrooms and a sleeping porch are located. After the house was built, Schneider is said to have expressed disappointment in its lack of upstairs closets to Maybeck, who replied that Swiss chalets had armoires instead of closets. Whether or not the story is true, the closets that were built into the bedrooms are not by Maybeck.⁸

Balconies project from the front of the Schneider house on both floors. The lower-floor balcony wraps around one corner to connect with the enclosed entryway, which is centered in the south side and reached by a short flight of steps. Putting the entrance on the side allowed the living room (plate 49) to extend across the front of the building with maximum effect, as in the Hopps house. Although the westward-facing living room occupies the "view side" of the house, it is not oriented toward that view in any dramatic way. The presence of French doors opening onto the balcony indicates that the panorama of the bay was meant to be enjoyed by stepping outside.

Horizontal redwood siding was used for the lower story, board and battens for the upper part of the house and the outside walls of the entryway. Maybeck finished the entrance wall with a decorative flourish that seems to be a pun on the idea of the grand entrance. Whereas in a mansion there might have been a large mirror, or perhaps a framed portrait, hanging near the entrance, here the window that illuminates the entry is surrounded by a flat redwood frame jigsawn with scrolls and curls. The playfulness evident in this frame recurs in the dining-room mantelpiece, which seems a shorthand version of a Chippendale scrolled pediment (plate 50). Although at thirteen by thirteen feet, the room is relatively modest in size, the fireplace occupies a third of one wall, and the mantelpiece, tapering toward the ceiling, creates an illusion of monumentality.

The Schneiders' lot (plate 51) was landscaped by John McLaren, a leading landscape gardener best known for his long tenure as superintendent of Golden Gate Park. It is likely that Maybeck designed the Schneiders' garden (he worked with McLaren, who had one of the Bay Area's largest nurseries, on other projects) but, as with the Hoppses' landscaping, there is no evidence to prove his involvement. The front garden is mostly planted in junipers. A formal circle of bulbs and roses around a central fountain originally occupied the eastern slope; stone walls defined the edges of the garden, and paved and gravel paths traced the circulation. Three redwood trees--which probably gave the house its name, Semper Virens--were planted at the northwestern corner of the house. By now they have been pruned and topped many times. The mania that gripped Berkeley residents in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for planting redwoods on the hillsides where they were not native was later lamented as the trees obscured people's views and buried their gardens under blankets of needles (Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 48, 53-65, 229).

Built for the geologist who discovered the San Andreas Fault, this concrete house was designed to be earthquake-proof. The arched openings of the projecting, second-story porches, the bands of colored stone, and decorative sgraffito patterns give this house a distinctly "Roman villa" quality, grafted, with Maybeck's usual deftness, onto the most modern of building methods (Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 261).

Maybeck designed this innovative, poured-concrete house to withstand earthquakes and fire and to recall the houses of ancient Pompeii (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 212).

No sooner had the Newhall interiors been finished than he created a house out of exposed concrete for geology professor Andrew Lawson (1907) (Fig. 272). Its symmetry, unadorned elements, and planar wall surfaces make it bolder than most schemes then realized by European modernists colleagues.

For a moment, Maybeck eulogized the call for experimentation with new forms of expression derived from new structural materials that Viollet had launched several decades before. The Lawson house is a spirited interpretation of an ancient Roman villa, but these fanciful allusions are discreet compared to the no-nonsense rendition of abstract form (Longstreth 1998: 353-54).

Maybeck looked for various ways to "age" stucco walls. He threw pails of muddy water onto new walls; he graduated their color from light to dark, with darker tones up under the eaves. The walls of the Lawson porches were once a Roman red; the dome of the rotunda of the Palace of Fine Arts is still a velvety burnt orange; the walls of the Kennedy house in Berkeley have a sunset glow in their various earth colors.

It is hard to believe that a client existed outside Maybeck's imagination for Wyntoon, his castle on the McCloud River, or for his reinforced concrete house of 1907. Wyntoon was commissioned by Mrs. Hearst, and the 1907 house by Prof. A.C. Lawson, a geologist whose advice was sought in the placing of the foundations of the Golden Gate Bridge (McCoy 1975: 18).

Although reinforced concrete had been used on the West Coast by E. L. Ransome during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, in 1907 it was still in an early stage of development. Ransome had reinforced small concrete buildings with wire cable and hoop iron. This had led to the development of reinforcing rods, used in the 1889 Stanford Museum in Palo Alto. After the 1906 earthquake and fire, Maybeck looked for a system of construction that would withstand seismic forces. In his 1907 Lawswon house in Berkeley, he used monolithic concrete construction. The roof was a thin concrete slab with a low pitch.

In the Lawson house light necklaces of colored stones adorned the second-story walls and the fascias of the overhanging slab; around the double arches of the recessed porches were stylized patterns of acanthus leaves in sgraffito. There wree no projections over the windows or French doors to the garden, but a round canopy sheltered the entrance door, at the side of the house.

An appreciation for the material was shown in the use of the arch for second-floor openings, and the relating of these to round shower room windows and a vertical row of round vents in the first-floor wall. Narrowness and height were absent; the house was Roman in conception, but modern in execution.

Maybeck related the house to the garden by a series of free-standing columns topped by individual pergolas, in which stick was piled upon stick as in the Christian Science Church. A pergolaed walk in the rear also stood free of the house and led to a pavilion. The wood applique on the fascia of the pavilion was in colors.

His feeling for concrete was also evident in the interiors, where wide arched doors led from one room to another. Among the many materials Maybeck tried out in the interior rooms was milk white Vitrolite for the walls of a bathroom. (McCoy 1975: 20).

Rear elevation of the Lawson house, shown under construction. Diamond shaped patterns in colored stones decorated the upper walls; murals covered the space around the arched openings of the porch.

View of the garden side of the Lawson house showing a rail that was added to the balcony. Designed by Maybeck, the rail was once a double garden gate (McCoy 1975: 22).

The design for the second Andrew Lawson house (1907) also has a Mediterranean flavor. The first [at 2461 Warring St., Berkeley], a Gothic house, had been located in the district south of the University, and when Professor Lawson later purchased a large tract of land on the hillside north of the campus, he again engaged Maybeck to design his house, which was to be constructed of reinforced concrete. Most likely Lawson's knowledge of geology spurred his interest in an earthquake-proof house; but certainly the San Francisco disaster added impetus to his decision for its building. Herman Kower, the engineer Maybeck had consulted for the design of Hearst Hall, was chosen to work out the structural details. But the early Roman flavor that the Lawson house evokes was the result of a romantic historical connection Maybeck made between the destructions of San Francisco and Pompeii. He would design as would a Pompeiian architect, but with modern materials and methods.(Cardwell 1977: 98).

The Lawson house is a two-storied rectangular structure placed on the upper portion of its hillside plot. A low-pitched gable roof, formed by concrete slabs covered with tar and gravel, continues in shed forms over portions that extend from the main block--a loggia covering the living space at the south and the stairwell at the north. On the exterior, at points where transverse concrete walls carry the second story, engaged pilasters one story in height support redwood trellises.

An interior spaciousness is emphasized by vistas into the garden through axially placed rooms. The entry hall leads at the right to a billiard room and ahead to a living area where large French doors open onto a terrace and garden. Flanking the living room are a study and a dining room with openings creating views through the length of the building. The second story contains bedrooms which are connected by dressing closets to open sleeping porches. On the south, the exterior loggia affords a sweeping view of the city below and the Bay beyond.

Maybeck was familiar with concrete surfaces through his work with the Florida hotels; but instead of experimenting with the textures of the walls of the Lawson house, he plastered them. The exterior is finished with pink and buff colored sand plasters and smooth-cast white concrete. The simply molded cornice and various wall panels are ornamented with diaper line patterns and insets of small colored tiles. The interior of the house is plastered--with the exception of the billiard room, which was to be veneered with wood.

While Maybeck made no dramatic strides in exploiting the concrete forms of the Lawson house, his treatment of the cornice and openings around the upstairs loggia is not based on conventional masonry forms; and, even with its plastered surfaces, the house has a monlithic appearance. His use of rigid frames and two-way slabs contributed to the open interior of the house; but its spaces are more geometrically and axially balanced than are those of most of his wooden structures (Cardwell 1977: 99).

While Maybeck was working on the Senger house, he also designed a house (plate 101) for Professor Andrew Lawson, who was to become world famous as the geologist associated with the Golden Gate Bridge from 1933 to 1937. In 1900 Lawson had joined the Maybecks and Farnum Griffith (a lawyer and sometime secretary to university president Benjamin Ide Wheeler) in purchasing a tract of land called La Loma Park, north of Daley's Scenic Park. Four years earlier Maybeck had designed a wooden house for Lawson south of the campus. Lawson's reasons for buying the new property are not known, but he may have been enticed by the views from the northern hills and by the prospect of building something again. As he later proved by constructing other houses on his property with his own labor, Lawson thoroughly enjoyed the building process; his experience with his Maybeck house was a kind of apprenticeship.

While exploring the geological conditions that caused the 1906 earthquake, Lawson ascertained that the main trace of the Hayward Fault ran right through the La Loma property on which he intended to build his new house. He became obsessed with constructing it to withstand earthquakes. Even though wooden houses had survived the shaking quite well, Lawson chose reinforced concrete as the most earthquake-proof--and also the most fire-resistant--material and immersed himself in its tudy. Maybeck was similarly engaged by the concept of building a house in concrete, a material that had fascinated architects in the United States and in Europe beginning in the nineteenth century. Frank Lloyd Wright's first building executed in poured concrete, Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois, had been built in 1906 and was well known throughout the architectural community. Maybeck's former protégé, Julia Morgan, had started up her office with a commission for a concrete bell tower for Mills College in Oakland.

Always interested in threading a path from past to present, Maybeck became captivated by the idea of designing a contemporary Pompeian villa to link the 1906 earthquake to the destruction of ancient Pompeii by volcanic eruption. Perhaps the idea came from his days at the Ecole, where student projects involving such historical prototypes were not unusual. Since Pompeian houses were of masonry construction and had cubistic forms with tile roofs and plaster walls decorated with mural paintings, they offered an appropriate historical antecedent. It is not clear in this and other works that Maybeck embedded in history which came first: his own design or his awareness of the architectural prototype. In any case, for the Lawson house he designed a long rectangular volume with a small projecting room on the north side next to the entry and a shallow wing on the south side; the latter provided a sunny room on the lower floor, with a sleeping porch above.

In contrast to the picturesque irregular massing of the Senger house, the simple mass of Lawson's house, punctuated by the voids of porches, expresses its masonry construction. The plaster of the framework was left white and outlined by scored lines on the walls; the plastered walls within the framework were integrally colored light red on the lower part and buff on the upper. As a student Maybeck had doubtless seen studies of Pompeian and Roman houses showing these colors. The buff walls are incised with a diaper pattern accented at the crossings with four small tiles (plate 103). Other diamonds of small tiles appear on the eaves, and the shapes of the window and door openings are accented with lines scored around them (plate 94). This deocrative scheme relates less to Pompeian styles than to the geometric patterns associated with the Viennese Secessionist movement. (A similar but richer surface treatment enlivens the upper walls of Frank Lloyd Wright's Avery Coonley house of 1908 in Riverside, Illinois.) An elaborate foliated design in sgrafitto surrounds the arched openings of the sleeping porch on the back of the house (plate 104). This was apparently a trial piece--a carefully executed drawing (plate 105) indicates what Maybeck intended for other wall surfaces. But as construction costs rose ever higher, Lawson must have eliminated the sgrafitto work along with the tile roof, both of which would have heightened the Mediterranean aspect of the house and lessened its stark, modern look.

Lawson's intense interest in concrete apparently blinded him and Maybeck to its cost; they probably led each other on in their enthusiasm for the project. Although the earthquake had accelerated the use of reinforced concrete in nonresidential urban buildings, the high costs of labor and materials had generally precluded its use in houses. The large and lavishly appointed Senger house, for example, cost $8,400--less than half the Lawson house, which cost $17,533. Lawson seems to have been determined to take part in the structural design, and the accounts of friends and neighbors indicate that he and Maybeck battled their way through the process until the house was completed in 1908.

The specifications included two sets of plans, one by the architects and one by Herman Kower, the engineer who had advised Maybeck on Hearst Hall. For the concrete work, two grades of cement were used: a rich grade for the framework of floors, beams, girders, roofs, and the stairs; a poorer mix for walls and partitions. The concrete was mixed by hand in batches of one cubic yard and poured one foot, at most, at a time. The lack of paved roads up the hill added to the difficulty and the expense, since mule-drawn wagons had to be used to haul cement to the site. The ornamental plasterwork was done by Hoff and Hoff, a firm of architectural sculptors, who also estimated the sgrafitto work at $350 to $375. Estimates for the roof of "Mission Tile" ran from $950 to $1,225. The Caen stone that Maybeck had wanted to import from France to use for the stairway was estimated at $225. Whan that proved too expensive, it was replaced by concrete that was integrally colored black and inset with diamond and other linear patterns made of gilt glass tesserae (plate 107). The railing has black-plaster balusters cast in a scrolled motif. By exaggerating the structural forms and varying the surface treatment of the materials, Maybeck transformed the ordinary materials into art.

The sweep of space from the entrance beside the stair hall to the doors leading to the terrace makes clear the path of movement into the central area. From this point the clarity of the ground-floor plan is revealed by axial views through the living room to the west and the dining room to the east. The orderly arrangement of spaces perceived through generous openings and the horizontal emphasis achieved by the wide spans of the concrete frame and the low ceilings induce a feeling of calm (plate 106). The denlike living room is divided into a reading area and an alcove introduced by a low arch that establishes an intimate fireside setting (plate 108). The dining room communicates with the outdoors through an opening onto the garden terrace (plate 109).

The five bedrooms upstairs are simple and well lighted. They all communicate directly with two sleeping porches; the one at the back of the house was equipped with two cold-water showers, a reminder of the generally spartan regimen of the health-conscious community. For the walls of the main bathroom upstairs (plate 110), Maybeck used large milk-white tiles of Vitrolite, the brand name of a high-fired vitreous material used extensively on shop fronts because of its durability. The large size of the tiles and their lustrous surface give the bathroom an unexpectedly luxurious feeling, considering the cheapness of the material. Here, as in the stairway, Mayeck's innovative use of practical materials makes one wish that he had lived long enough to practice in the age of plastics. Looking back on his career, he himself expressed that wish.¹

The Lawson family lived in the house until Mrs. Lawson's death, by which time their sons had grown up and left home. Thereafter, Lawson traveled a lot and occupied only a part of the house when he was in Berkeley; the rest he rented. In the 1920s he married the daughter of a colleague, and they moved into a smaller house, with a concrete frame and hollow tile walls, on the back of his property, which was designed by a young ardchitect named Jack Ballantine. Lawson himself added a gallery wing to this house in the 1930s, and in the 1940s he supervised the building of one last house on his property. The neighbors watched anxiously as this aged and famous man teetered back and forth carrying loads of mortar across the roof of the adjacent garage.

Apparently the Lawsons moved from the house designed by Maybeck because the new Mrs. Lawson found it too large and dark. Admittedly, the billiard room on the gorund floor at the front of the house had been painted a deep maroon as a substitute for dark wood paneling, which had been eliminated to reduce costs; the other rooms were painted in earth colors. But the house need not have been dark inside, and it certainly is not today. The large openings for windows and doors, no longer hung with heavy drapes, now let in an abundance of daylight on the south side of the house; the dark billiard room and the richly colored entrance hall on the north side are more dimly lit (Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 112, 114, 116-27, 226).

Maybeck acknowledged in his building art that climates and conditions varied from place to place and that ideals of life were diverse. Hillside sites called for forms differing from those built on flat lands. In northern California, a region of trees, wood became the natural material with which to build. And where sunshine abounded but the weather was cool, as in Berkeley, windows multiplied to let in the warmth. Houses built in other climates would develop in other ways. Maybeck was interested in modern materials and processes, but he felt standardization of the kind of life people live was neither desirable nor possible. His desire to solve the problem of creating a frame for human life in the best and most expressive way possible meant that his solutions would vary as did his clients' styles of living, even if the locale of their houses did not.

Two examples of Maybeck's work, in areas over two hundred miles away from San Francisco Bay give physical form to his belief in the influence of climate and place. They were designed for construction, one to the north and one to the south, in the hot Sacramento-San Joaquin Valley of California. The Dudley Saeltzer house (1907) in Redding is a hillside house adapted to the climate by the addition of a deep eastern porch to serve as a cool retreat from the intense heat of the western sun. For its construction Maybeck chose a local Oregon cedar which was much less expensive in this inland town than the redwood of the coastal regions (Cardwell 1977: 158).

Altered, 1970s (Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 229).

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).

A dentist by occupation, Tufts seems to have been a staunch patron of art and architecture, since he commissioned three houses from Maybeck: the first in San Anselmo in 1905, the second in San Rafael in 1908, and the third in Berkeley in 1931 (Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 41, 229).

nm (Cardwell 1977: 242).

Altered, n.d. (Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 229).

nm (Cardwell 1977: 242).

nm (Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 229).

Abbreviations