• Guy Hyde Chick house
• Thomas F. Hunt house
• R. H. Mathewson house
• C. W. Whitney house
• S. Erlanger house
• H. F. Jackson house remodeling
• A. E. Bingham house
• J. A. Owens house
• Dahlia Loeb house
• Alice Gay house
• Abbreviations

A fine example of Maybeck's mastery of design in wood. The broad gable roof ends in trellising at the gable eaves. Esther McCoy has this to say of it: "The Chick house was developed under a gable roof, with particular emphasis on the upper half of the gable ends; it extended two feet beyond the first floor, forming a bonnet around the bank of second floor windows." The material of the gable projections is vertical redwood siding with alternating round and flat battens; the rest of the house is shingled (Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 280).

Two of Maybeck's fine works in shingle in his middle period were the 1913 Chick house in Berkeley and the 1917 Bingham house in Montecito. The Chick house was developed under a gable roof, with particular emphasis on the upper half of the gable ends; it extended two feet beyond the first floor, forming a bonnet around the bank of second-floor windows. The material as well as the plane was changed--vertical redwood boards were used as surfacing for the gable ends of the second floor, the battens varying between flat and rounded ones. The interior space of the projections at the four corners was developed as bedroom closets.

The fine trellising at the eave line tied the house into the green of the oaks, while the notching and stacking of the shingles at the foundation line and on the arch of a door related the work to indigenous carpentry. The house had an air of simple elegance. In the living room a huge fireplace was flanked on either side by floor-to-ceiling French doors so that it appeared to be set in a glass wall--a daring effect for 1913. Cove lighting further enhanced the drama (McCoy 1975: 43-46).

The Chick house, nestled among live oaks, was lighted by banks of windows under the wide eaves.

View of the Chick house, Berkeley, 1913, showing trellis. By piling stick upon stick Maybeck gave his trellises substance and depth; the play of light through them enriched many an eave line (McCoy 1975: 43).

Most of Maybeck's work designed prior to the construction of the Christian Science church can be roughly categorized as medieval or classical by noting its predominating lines and details. But the fusion of idea and form, modeled volume and structural order, handcrafted and machined materials, which had been so brilliantly achieved in the church, are repeated to a degree in all later residential designs. This blending makes any classification very arbitrary. The houses become neither medieval nor classical, but they do reveal a strong individualistic order--sometimes emphasizing economy, the terrain, or structure, but more frequently portraying a way of life. Maybeck expressed this in an interview: "The thing to do is to make the home fit the family...I never plan a home for a man until I have asked him a lot of questions. 'What sort of woman is your wife? What kind of clothes do you both wear? What do you most like to read? Do you enjoy music?'" (Note 11: Bernard Maybeck interviewed by Mark Quest, 1927.)

One of the first designs of the new decade, the Guy H. Chick house (1914), is the ultimate statement of the chalet in its most sophisticated form. (Note 12: The house has been remodeled and published in House Beautiful, 104, (May 1962), pp. 150-57.) The low-pitched gable roof derives from the earlier chalet types; but Maybeck's integration of the house and its garden is not found in vernacular Swiss structures and his personal interpretation of details obscures prototypical forms. The house is two-storied; portions of its upper-story are covered by vertical redwood boards and specially molded battens, the remaining surfaces are clad in gray-green stained shingles or natural sand-finished plaster. Strong cubical projections from the main block accent the corners and function as closets for the upstairs bedrooms. Its broad eaves are patterned by doubling and tripling framing members, and feather into trelliage which, with the design of the Christian Science church, had become a characteristic detail of Maybeck's work. All the trellises--at the eaves, at the entrance, and the handsomely arranged one around the exterior shoulders of the concrete fireplace--blur the silhouette of the house to blend it with its verdant setting.

Located in Berkeley's Chabot canyon, the Chick house is sited on a large piece of gently sloping land covered by a superb growth of California Live Oaks. Over the years the garden grove has been supplemented with plantings of azaleas and rhododendrons. Walks and terraces create a transition space between the house and garden and, by providing large sliding glass doors, Maybeck made it easy for the occupants to move from one into the other. Although the Chick house makes excellent use of its garden spaces by extended vistas, it does not fit Maybeck's early definition of architecture as "landscape gardening around a few rooms." (Note 13: Hillside Club Bulletin (1906-07).) The house is not a casual arrangement of a few rooms; but, more importantly, it displays fully, as the Senger house had only hinted, the design of interior and exterior spaces as correlative units rather than adjunctive ones. Renaissance design and Beaux-Arts training have produced many superb examples of gardens complementing building forms, but the scale and the sensitivity of Maybeck's design often had a greater affinity with Japanese work which combines natural and constructed environments into one inseparable design.

The Chick house has a central hall plan similar to the Flagg chalet; but it is more formal in its organization. The house is entered from beneath a circular pergola through glass doors into an entry hall which bisects the building. Distant views of the surrounding gardens are visible through glass doors or windows of adjoining rooms. The interiors, when seen in photographs, appear more conventional than others that Maybeck designed; but the rooms are finely proportioned and confidently accented with solids and voids to give a sense of unity and flowing volume. The walls of the living room are covered with a dull gold velvet, matching the highlights of the redwood trim. Rough beams carrying the second-story rooms are boxed with finished lumber, and, near the plastered ceiling, a molded wood cornice forms a trough for indirect lighting. The finish used for most rooms is a plaster surface trimmed with natural redwood; however, in the large upstairs space designated as the boys' room, board and batten walls and exposed beams and rafters were Maybeck's selection for rough-and-tumble action (Cardwell 1977: 165-68).

In 1913 Maybeck designed a house for the Guy Hyde Chick family in a canyon filled with oaks in Oakland near the Berkeley border. The siting of this house relates it to a design for a hillside house that Maybeck had drawn up years earlier (plate 127), perhaps for a Hillside Club publication, but never built. The house in his drawing straddles a hillside and has a cross axis that starts with a terrace on the lower slope then proceeds up a flight of steps and through the house to a terrace on the other side, from which another flight of steps resumes the ascent up the hill. The Chick house does not incorporate the same sequence of stairs and terraces shown in the drawing--nor is there any evidence that Maybeck even suggested it. But in not carrying out some plan for a landscaped cross axis, both Maybeck and the owners missed an opportunity to fulfill one of his finest visions.

When he designed the Chick house, Maybeck seems not only to have been reacting to the possibilities of the hillside site but also to have been reflecting on the chalet-inspired houses of his earlier years. Indeed, the closest relative of the Chick house is the 1901 Flagg house (plate 29). The Chick house has a rectangular plan subdivided on the ground floor into three rectangular sections of the same proportion as the house itself. The kitchen breaks out of the main rectangle to form one side of a southeast-facing terrace, connected to the dining room by double doors. Like the house in Maybeck's drawing, the Chick house has two important entrances centered in the long sides. The formal entrance to the house, on the sharply sloping south side, is preceded by an intimate hemispherical terrace sheltered by a trellis of the same shape, which extends several feet beyond it (plate 128). The graceful arc of the trellis complements the generous width of the arched opening in which the entrance doors and flanking windows are set. The north-side entrance (plate 129), located beneath a balcony with a railing of cutout trefoils, opens from flat land near the driveway and the kitchen, making it the more convenient one for everyday use. The importance of the kitchen entrance is signaled by recessing it under a low Tudor arch. At the apex of the arch the shingles are cinched up as though a curtain has been lifted to reveal a stage. The yellow ceiling of this recessed entry adds to the drama.

Accents of bright colors were added to specificparts of the rosy brown building, not to create patterns but to highlight elements of the composition, as in a painting. The specifications call for yellow on the roof soffits; red for the rafters and for the balcony and kitchen-gate tracery as well as the doors; green for the heavy timbers and the upper-story bays; and Prussian blue for the front door. A member of the family later recalled standing on the downslope with her mother and Maybeck looking up at the freshly painted house and hearing her mother ask him, "Do you think perhaps it is a little too bright?" "Madam," Maybeck replied, with a sweep of his arm that embraced the whole house, "in twenty years it will be beautiful!" They were left to ponder his meaning. Did he think that the colors would mellow by then, or that they would never fade? They soon learned to love them as they were.³

The exterior alludes to the chalet in its roof form and in the use of materials associated with rusticity: wooden shingles for the walls and board-and-batten cladding for the upper parts of the walls at the corners and on the ends, where the upper floor projects and hangs over the lower floor like a saddlebag (plate 130). These projections contain storage space and are an ingenious solution to the problem of providing closets for rooms without diminishing the interior space. Their placement on the exterior near the roof adds to the sculptural quality of the house.

The plan invites circulation through the ground-floor public rooms in the most gracious way. The long east-west axis through the front rooms and out the openings at either end is balanced by a cross axis created by windows on the north and south sides of the living room (plates 131-33). The free circulation of space and the opening up of the walls to the outside through seven-foot-tall double doors of plate glass has caused many people to label Maybeck a proto-modernist. But in the central-hall staircase (plate 135), we find Maybeck up to his usual tricks of using traditional forms in startling ways. A post supporting the ceiling has been made into an elegant classical urn in redwood set on a paneled base that interrupts the stair railing. The railing ends in a gracefully turned newel post and has slender balusters that recall the Regency style. The staircase is an ensemble, a set piece that plays against the simplicity of its surroundings.

The three upstairs bedrooms are practical rooms that have no strong features to detract from their views into the oak trees. The yellow on the undersides of the eaves lightens the effect of their broad overhang. On the east end a sleeping porch (plate 134), formerly enclosed only with screens, is given the full rustic treatment with shaped rafters and board-and-batten walls. This kind of rustic family room was common in the Californian houses of the time.

In October 1991 another catastrophic fire occurred in the East Bay hills, this time in south Berkeley and Oakland; it destroyed Maybeck's Warren P. Staniford house of 1925 and the Edwin S. Pillsbury house of 1928. Miraculously, his house for Guy Hyde Chick, which was in the path of the fire, was saved. Although the number of constructed works by Maybeck has decreased, many of those that remain have been lovingly restored, and the growing admiration for his work will doubtless assure its survival--barring, that is, future natural catastrophes (Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 138-45, 225, 232).

Even in the 1915 house for Thomas F. Hunt where materials and form are used with restrained elegance, Maybeck's performance is erratic. (Note 16: The house has been relocated and remodeled.) The Dutch colonial overtones of the house can perhaps be attributed to the fact that Professor Hunt and his family were recent arrivals from the Atlantic Coast. (It is not recorded whether the owners prevailed on Maybeck for a Colonial design or whether Maybeck used a gambrel roof and white trim to express their eastern background.) Certainly the results bolster the criticism of the academic architect that Maybeck was at best casual in his use of historical styles. The house was set close to the street to reserve the rear of the site for a tennis court. Its facade is symmetrically composed in contrast with the plan. The entrance portico is tightly fitted between the two shingled blocks railed with classic balusters. Its pediment and wood painted cornice are penetrated by an arched recess, which appears too large for the portico and too small for a welcoming entrance.

The interior walls of the Hunt house are finished with alternating boards of redwood and ponderosa pine, separated by a narrow stirp of wood stained deep blue. A Greek fret of the same blue is stenciled on the boards and a silver design accents the strips. Base and cornice moldings of the walls are enamelled white. French doors separate the entry, living room, study and, in the dining room where china closets are covered by similar units, the doors are glazed with mirrors. A fireplace with hobs is finished in a special concrete made with a white marble sand, and its wood mantel, also painted white, is supported on classic mutules. The stairway has an open stringer, and its railing of turned spindles ends in a swirl caging the newel post. Even though the individual balusters and newel posts are strangely proportioned, the verve with which the design of the stairway is executed is admirable (Cardwell 1977: 173).

Relocated from Spruce Street to 53 Domingo Ave., Berkeley (Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 232).

Soon after the end of the war Maybeck executed several small but significant commissions. They revealed no change in his approach to work. In the 1919 Matheuson (sic) house two broad gabled roofs were gathered at one end of the house, under a roof with an off-center ridge, with remarkable grace. The first-floor walls were of stucco, and the upper ones of rough redwood boards were stained a moss green (McCoy 1975: 48).

The Matheuson (sic) house, Berkeley, 1919, was one of the finest examples of Maybeck's ability to cut back eaves and swing them up while maintianing an uncomplicated roof structure (McCoy 1975: 49).

To Maybeck beauty was an essential element of house construction, and he was determined that it should not be eliminated by the increasing cost of building. In the R. H. Mathewson design (1915) also on Buena Vista Way in Berkeley, Maybeck illustrated in simple carpentry construction the blending of structure, color, and pattern into a crisp architectural form in which he reduced costs by reducing sizes. (Note 14: At the time of the Berkeley fire in 1923, Maybeck responded to a request from E. R. Sturm, Glendale, California for a small cottage with a design practically duplicating that of the Mathewson house.) Just as in the 1902 Boke house in which he had manipulated the plan to increase the sense of spaciousness, so again he turned to the plan to accomplish his purposes. The house has no dining room nor even a nook pretending to be one; in addition, all of its esential service elements are minimized, sacrificing secondary areas in order to create a large, handsome living space.

Built on a corner site, the house has a one-story living room and a two story service wing skillfully contained under a dog-leg gable roof which slopes off into minor gables over projecting forms of the plan. The living room is spanned longitudinally by two built-up beams which eliminate the necessity of horizontal ties for transverse framing members and end wall supports. A small shed roof over the large north window runs counter to the pitch of the main gable and becomes a visual statement of the resourceful and imaginative framing of the interior volume. The walls of the house are gray stucco, while their upper reaches are covered with boards and battens stained gray-green. Windows divided into small square lights by thick blue-green muntins--suggesting a grille set between the sill and the projecting eaves--fill the gable ends.

Maybeck had used the theme of glazed gable walls with great success in the Christian Science church, and in the Mathewson house it was made possible by the longitudinal framing that was natural but contrary to normal practice. A windowed gable with sheltering eaves is, perhaps, the single detail of Maybeck's work most repeated by later moderns, and it is one so distinctive in form that it suggests a regional style as strongly as do the horizontal lines of windows and extended overhangs used by the architects of the Prairie School. (Note 15: Cf. Jean M. Banngs, "Bernard Ralph Maybeck, Architect: Comes Into His Own," Architectural Record, 1034 (January 1948), pp. 72-79.)

Simple construction combined with excellent design was Maybeck's answer to the problem of building a beautiful home at a modest price (Cardwell 1977: 171).

While the R. H. Mathewson house escaped the Berkeley fire of 1923, the Maybeck house (#2) on Buena Vista Way lies in ashes in the foreground (Cardwell 1977: 208).

235, 236. East and west elevations, R. H. Mathewson house, Berkeley, 1915. Documents Collection, College of Environmental Design, University of California Berkeley (Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 232).

The Mathewson studio was one of 13 landmark homes designated as part of Berkeley's fourth Historic District in 2002. These homes are representative of the distinctive Bay Region Tradition and were built on property developed by Maybeck. In addition to the Mathewson house (1915), the 13 designated homes include the architect's famed Lawson house (1907–08), the Bishop house (1923) by Ernest Coxhead, and the Ballantine house (1924) designed by John Ballantine. (cf. Berkeley Landmarks designated in 2002.)

A change in the consistent good quality of Maybeck's work started in 1914 when demands on his time to finish the Fair buildings forced him to hire draftsmen to complete his own projects. He seemed to be unable to direct men other than Mark and John White whom he had trained to develop his sketches into strong, integrated designs. Perhaps his failure was due to the way he worked--his preliminaries set a broad framework which he strengthened and refined as the detail drawings developed. Unless he directed the design and construction through to completion, including supervision on the job site, the resulting houses were not always successful. One house built in 1915 in north Berkeley for C. W. Whitney failed to resolve Maybeck's conception of a building angled to conform to a difficult terrain.

Built on a steep downslope fronting on Keith Avenue, the Whitney house consists of two rectangular blocks angled and merged to fit the shoulder of the hillside. One block contains the entry and parents' rooms, the other combines a two-storied living room, surrounded by a gallery with an open loft space for the children over the dining room and kitchen. A large, rough concrete fireplace, stained black and freely ornamented with abstract swirls of ultramarine and gold, is set against the north wall of the living room facing the dark void of the loft space. The design starts to develop a theme of angled spaces with projecting bays and recessed decks to repeat the re-entrant form to the building mass; but the conflict of the modular patterning with the neo-baroque exuberance of detail and decoration combined with discordant angular lines, creates a design lacking in coherence and the refinement of form and pattern expected of Maybeck. (Cardwell 1977: 172).

The clients wanted a medieval English manor house, but the product resists classification. The design reveals Maybeck's compositional skills and his ability to manipulate eclectic elements with originality (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 173).

As a result of Maybeck's buildings at the Fair and the recognition that followed, 1916 saw the start of construction of a series of houses whose scale and budgets Maybeck had not known since his work on the Roos house in San Francisco. Clients impressed by the populatity of the Palace of Fine Arts turned to Maybeck as an artist worthy of patronage. One of the first commissions of 1916 was for the S. H. Erlanger house in Forest Hills, San Francisco. The owners had selected as a prototype an English medieval manor, Samlesbury Hall, in Lancashire, but Maybeck's creative interpretation of English Gothic dissolved into details and proportions peculiar to him. In his design, Maybeck piles room on room in casual abandon to form three stories burgeoning with polygonal bays, protruding dormers, and open decks. It is a large, shingled house with steep, gabled roofs. While its overall form discourages classification, its articulated living room pavilion, tall, trussed and raftered, echoes Maybeck's Gothic designs (Cardwell 1977: 174).

Maybeck obviously found the living hall indispensable to creating a congenial setting, for he used it over and over again in houses large and small, changing the materials and colors as he saw fit--as, for example, in the Roos, Erlanger, and Young houses.

Regarding the 1916 Erlanger house (plate 143), also built in Forest Hill, Maybeck wrote a cryptic but revealing description:

The house is our attempt to suggest the idea of an English character in California. Although this house would never happen in England, it yet has an English feeling. The lower wing is a chapel form living room greatly used in an early period, the ceiling of this room is very similar to one in Sainesbury Hill Lancashire. The second story windows are of iron like their English prototypes. The building and its setting among the trees loudly proclaims the good taste of Mrs. and Mr. Erlanger from whom the suggestions came.⁴

Maybeck complied with the Erlangers' wishes for an English effect by giving their house a Tudorish exterior and a "chapel form living room" that occupies a wing by itself on the north side (plate 147). The low eaves of the living-room roof create a horizontal emphasis along the street side of the house. The rest of the rooms pile up on the south side in a gable-roofed block set perpendicular to the living-room wing. A bank of dormer windows across the northern slope of the roof lights the third-floor bedroom, which has a view over the living-room roof.

On the southeastern corner is a polygonal sleeping porch (plate 146) that has the best exposure and a panoramic view. Where the porch projects over the brick walls of the entrance below, Maybeck has given it a tiered base of boldly scaled moldings that cuts into the walls and swells out above. The fanfare of the base suggests that a weighty element like a tower is bearing down on this important corner of the house, yet the transparency of the porch above contradicts this suggestion. The resulting composition is a trope on the whole idea of a castle keep.

Most of Maybeck's great living halls are entered indirectly from a hall or anteroom so that they strike the eyes of the beholder with maximum effect. This strategy was not peculiar to Maybeck; Frank Lloyd Wright, among others, also understood the dramatic effect of coming from a low, dark space into a high, airy one. In the Erlanger house a heavy beam on ornate consoles forms a secondary entrance arch over a short flight of steps that mount from the front door to the stair hall (plate 148). On the right side of the hall the stairway continues to the second floor; on the left is the living room, a step lower than the hall. The changing levels of this warm redwood entry contribute to the drama of the entrance sequence. So does the window behind a balustrade on the left wall just inside the door, which offers a preview of the grand hall that will come into full view around the corner.

The Erlangers' living room is as theatrical as the Rooses' but composed in a different key. A great medieval barn is suggested by the exposed structural system of curved laminated arches set against horizontal, vertical, and diagonal boards woven together in a wooden brocade. Its effect recalls the sentiment Ruskin expressed in his 1853 "Lectures on Architecture" that the expression "beneath my roof" was more descriptive of the idea of hospitable shelter than its counterpart "within my walls." At the northern end of the room is a loft occupied by the master bedroom, from which casement windows open to permit a close view of the ceiling, as well as the room below (plate 149). Underneath it is the dining room in a low-ceilinged alcove. At the other end of the living room is a twelve-foot-tall bay into which sunlight streams through three tiers of windows on its three sides (plate 150). The space within the bay, large enough for two chairs and an occasional table, provides a place for intimate conversation or for contemplation of the garden. Like the Rooses' living room, the Erlangers' balances intimacy with grandeur by incorporating the elements--the monumental hearth, the high-peaked ceiling, and the bay--that Ruskin and his followers, particularly Richard Norman Shaw, considered sacred to the house (Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 45, 150-55, 156, 157, 232).

More thoroughly typical of Maybeck is the home at 270 Castenada Avenue, designed for S. Erlanger and begun in April, 1916. Although this is among the most visually pleasing of Maybeck's structures, it is less-inventively articulated inside than others. The cathedral ceiling here is truncated by the presence of a second floor bedroom directly over the dining area.

The interior is less formal than the exterior would imply. Repeated rhythms of sharply-pointed gables reiterate Maybeck's and other architects' allegiance to early American seventeenth century homes. Much of the strength and purity of Old Salem is here, but to the ageless traditions of massive framing, wooden board or shingle sheathing and small-paned leaded windows, Maybeck has added a freedom, a thrust of interior to exterior, that is inescapably his own (Olmsted and Watkins 1969: 131).

nm (Cardwell 1977: 244).

Remodeling. Condition unknown (Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 232).

The most striking of the large houses of 1916 is the one designed for A. E. Bingham in Montecito, near Santa Barbara. Here, with an ample budget, Maybeck had for the first time a reasonably level site of virtually unlimited size with which to work. The house is composed of gabled roofs crossed over one, two, and three-storied forms. Its exterior is covered with dark-stained redwood shakes. Exterior Venetian blinds of wood controlled the light and heat of the southwestern sun. Strong masonry piers and facings of local stone contrast in color with the walls and in form with the extended planes of the roof. In his hillside houses Maybeck had emphasized the rake of the gable roof in forms harmonizing with sloping sites; in the Bingham house he allowed the long horizontal lines of the ridges and the eaves to dominate in response to its level and extended garden setting.

The house was laid out on a five-foot grid, but as the design progressed and became more involved, Maybeck abandoned, at least in part, his modular planning. The plan connects a series of spaces to create a vista one hundred and thrity feet long, over half within the house and the rest under an exterior pergola. The strong axis is composed with cross vistas through square seven-foot plate glass windows facing one another or opposite a principal entrance. Adding to the interest of the crossed axes, changes in the level of the floor plane, accents of the structural framing, and variations in interior shapes make the Bingham house a superb volumetric composition. Its formality may not be as appealing as Maybeck's more romantic interpretations, but it is no less surely handled.

The living room, designed for musical performances, once housed a pipe organ in addition to a grand piano. It is spanned by two heavy structural bents made of laminated lumber which carry beams the length of the room for support of the roof rafters. All of the structural members as well as the walls to normal ceiling heights are cased in white birch, watercolor stained. Raw silk dyed an ultamarine blue covers the frieze surrounding the upper portions of the room and the panels formed by the framing. A cornice conceals recessed lighting, and its gilded surface is highlighted by primary color accents wiped into the sculptured depths of its classical moldings. The richly decorated house was ornately furnished by the Binghams; yet its third-story contained a simple wood-framed game room reminiscent of the simple home. Grouped casement sash affording dramatic views of the coastline and the rugged Santa Ynez mountains, and a simple rhythm of exposed framing formed the decorative scheme (Cardwell 1977: 178-79).

Richly detailed, the formality of the decorative scheme is enlivened by the varied axes and levels of the magnificent volumetric compositon (Cardwell 1977: 180).

Two commissions that called for great living rooms and outdoor spacesto match illustrate his ability to reinvent the elements of stylish living on a grand scale. One was for Arthur E. Bingham in Montecito, 1916 (plate 162); the other was for Earle C. Anthony in Los Angeles, 1924-30 (see chapter 6).

The Bingham house offers more proof, if any were needed, that the site of a Maybeck house determined its form. Maybeck had almost no large, flat sites on which to build; in fact, the Binghams' fifteen and a half acres in Montecito (a millionair's suburb near Santa Barbara) gave him his first opportunity to design a house that occupied a large part of the site and still had enough level land for orchards and large gardens. When originaly built, the Bingham house stretched more than 136 feet in an east-west direction across a landscape sprinkled with oaks; it included a pergola (plate 164) more than half the length of the main part of the house. The dimensions of the pergola and the scale of its short, thick stone columns and its rhythmic wooden superstructure make the house seem even longer, as though it were curving with the earth's surface. The central part of the house rises in a series of cross-gabled forms that echo the distant Santa Inez Mountains (plate 163). The roof is punctuated by the strong geometry of the venturi chimneys, which are a Maybeck signature and virtually the only form he never altered.

The off-center entrance inside a low stone arch is understated, as Maybeck's entrances often are; the most imposing arch belongs to the alcove adjacent to the entry but opening from the living room, which was designed for the Binghams' pipe organ. The use of rough stone laid in irregular courses for the lower part of this front section of the house calls attention to its centrality. On the south-eastern, or garden, side of the house, the same stone is used in the base of a large terrace opening off the central hall and dining room. The sequence of spaces from the entrance through the house sets up another axis across the long main axis. Both axes end in outdoor living areas that are stops along the way to the gardens and the open landscape beyond.

The living room (plates 165, 166) was called the music room by the Binghams because it was designed for performances and housed a grand piano in addition to the organ. The intersection of the hallway with the living room provides a stage from which to appreciate the grand room before descending the four steps to its level. The strong directional emphasis of the room toward the pergola is countered by multiple cross-axes set up by the opposition of the organ alcove to the massive dark-veined-white-marble fireplace and large windows on either side of the room that frame views of the landscape. Massive box beams made of laminated timbers are spaced every five feet to carry the weight of the roof. The large ceiling coffers were framed by an egg-and-dart frieze and filled with panels covered in raw silk dyed ultramirine blue. The upper part of the walls was clad with the same cloth; the lower part and the box beams were faced with lightly stained white birch. Lights recessed behind the ceiling cornice lit the ceiling.

Compared to the Rooses' great hall, the surfaces and appointments of the Binghams' living room were more conventionally luxurious and showed less of Maybeck's inventiveness with materials and details. The clients seem to have dictated much of the room's appearance, and its furnishings were of great concern to them. Maybeck's office files reveal that Bingham stipulated and carefully checked the materials for the house and that he conveyed suggestions, often from his wife, for almost everything, even for the size and placement of the attic windows. Maybeck's hand is most telling in the harmonious proportions of the music room, which are carried through the rest of the ground floor. The plan of the main part of the house is perfectly balanced between a variety of spatial volumes on different levels and interpenetrations of outside and inside spaces.

Even after they moved into the house, the Binghams continued to add to it, extending the service wing in 1918. The next year Bingham requested a sketch for a mailbox and a paper box; plans for the extensive gardens were a continuing preoccupation. Apparently, the demands of Bingham's business obliged them to move, and they sold the house in 1925. Bingham later wrote to Maybeck, "We did dislike to leave our beautiful home in Santa Barbara--Mrs. Bingham loved it so."⁵

The Binghams' house was Maybeck's rendition of the oversize brown-shingle bungalow that the Green brothers made famous through their work in Pasadena. As far as Maybeck's documented work is concerned, this style of house was an aberration, perhaps only because he had no commissions to design others like it. During the rest of his career he mainly designed buildings that used wood as a secondary rather than a primary material. The nationwide preference for traditional building styles from northern European and Mediterranean countries reasserted itself in the 1920s and yielded an enormous number of buildings in California using generic Mediterranean elements: tile roofs, warm-toned stuccoed walls with arched openings, and wood trellises and pergolas that defined outdoor spaces (Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 163-68).

nm (Cardwell 1977: 244).

Additions by Maybeck for J. L. Mears, 1922 (Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 232).

nm (Cardwell 1977: 244).

nm (Cardwell 1977: 244).

Condition unknown (Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 233).

A small rustic cottage which incorporates living space with outdoors charm is 196 Twin Peaks Boulevard, one of the earliest homes on the steeper slopes of Twin Peaks. Maybeck was commissioned to design the cottage for Miss Alice Gay in 1917--with the express stipulation that it could cost no more than four thousand dollars. Maybeck managed to keep well within his budget; but, in so doing was forced to subdue the superb motifs and wood carvings usually so essential a part of his buildings. Redwood was used throughout, however, and the large living room has a beamed ceiling (Olmsted and Watkins 1969: 130).

Abbreviations