They also include the only surviving example of the three dazzling Arabian Nights automobile showrooms the architect designed for the famed Packard dealer, E. C. Anthony, in the late 1920s.

To achieve the appropriate theatrical atmosphere, Maybeck contrasted rose colored Numidian marble (now injudiciously painted white) with black Belgian marble and freely adapted architectural styles and building materials, much as a painter might mix colors on his pallette.

• Dahlia Loeb house
• Alice Gay house
• Forest Hills Association club building
• Packard Automobile showrooms, Earle C. Anthony
• Family Service Agency(formerly, Associated Charities) building

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).

Built by volunteers from the area, its lofty meeting room has a great exposed beam ceiling (Gebhard, Winter, and Sandweiss 1985: 113).

The 1919 Forest Hill Clubhouse with its excellent treatment of wall planes related back to the 1899 Town and Gown Clubhouse; the scalloped fascia was similar to one on the Forest Hill School at Carmel. Redwood boards, 1 by 4 inches, were set within panels of 1 by 8-inch redwood to give a half-timbered effect (McCoy 1975: 48).

The first new construction with the full resumption of his practice in 1919 was a clubhouse built for the Forest Hills Association. The commission came through a former client and Bohemian Club friend, E. C. Young(Cardwell 1977: 181).

The same [that Maybeck didn't seem to have made all of the final decisions] is true of the Forest Hill Clubhouse. In fact, the drawings name E. C. Young as associate architect, but the office records do not indicate the nature of the collaboration. Exterior details of half-timber falsework, brick veneer panels, and jigsawn barge boards lend an air of eclectic English architecture to the clubhouse. It consists of an assemby hall, club room, balcony lounge area, kitchen, and independent living quarters for a resident housekeeper. A flexible arrangement of spaces form the assembly hall. The central portion is covered by a high trussed roof and the north end diminishes to a gabled alcove, rafter framed. At the south end, the balcony and the area below it may be used as part of the room. Neither a dominant structural order, consisten patterning, nor strongly composed vistas give the clubhouse organization. Only the non-axial arrangement of the fireplace and openings recalls the spatial quality of Maybeck's better work (Cardwell 1977: 182).

E. C. Young, associate architect (Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 233).

The Forest Hill Club House at 381 Magellan Avenue was designed by Maybeck and built on weekends by members of the Forest Hill Association, residents of the area. The facade of the structure, completed in 1919, is more restrained than Maybeck's other works, but the interior is Maybeck at his best. The high ceiling with its massive beam work is one of the architect's most inspiring (Olmsted and Watkins 1969: 131).

The queen of the Van Ness Avenue automobile palaces, built for one of Maybeck's great clients. The red marble columns have unfortunately been painted white (Woodbridge & Woodbridge 1992: 115).

The Packard showrooms in San Francisco (1926) and Oakland (1928) were built in conjunction with the firm of John H. Powers and John H. Ahnden. Maybeck prepared schmatic drawings which his associates used to make preliminary structural, mechanical, and electrical drawings for his approval. Maybeck then concentrated on the decorative features of the design and charged Anthony a straight fee for his "art work." (Note 8: B. R. Maybeck MSS, "E. C. Anthony," C.E.D. Docs.) It was a system which left no give and take as the design progressed; and the decorative schemes, rather than growing out of the spatial order and the patterns of structures as they had in the Christian Science church, were restricted to surface treatments and added ornament. The showrooms became stage sets, where automobiles or "magic carpets" were sold "to carry one away to faraway placaes." In a decade that first brought wide ownership of individual vehicles, many people shared Maybeck's romantic vision. (Note 9: Advertisements for automobiles in magazines published contemporarily with the construction of the showrooms portray the same romantic image.)

The San Francisco showroom, on Van Ness Avenue, was opened in 1927 with a gala array of motion picture actresses and a special radio broadcast. Anthony also owned two broadcasting stations and the San Francisco building was designed to carry large steel towers for transmitting antennae on its roof. The building is a four-story rectangular block, its front third contains a two-story high showroom with mezzanine sales offices. Maybeck chose to design in the free, classical style he had learned in André's atelier. But his combination of the temple-like salesroom with the frankly utilitarian service section, and the brutal penetration of the overscaled frieze for service floor windows, combined with unorthodox unfluted Corinthian columns produced a mannerist design even less admired by his Beaux-Arts colleagues than his design for the Palace of Fine Arts (Cardwell 1977: 220).

Screen walls of black tiles lie between red columns and are penetrated by richly sculptured doorways. A large, sand-colored entablature crowns the salesroom. Color is carried into the interior with pigmented stains worked into the wood ceiling of the sales room. Maybeck had intended to use a waste cedar product for this ceiling--boards mottled with areas of unsound wood cut from trees infested with a fungus growth--but when this material was not available, a similar disfigured cypress shipped from Florida was substituted. Pigments were also worked into the crevices of ornamental plaster brackets and the moldings of the column capitals which housed colored spotlights illuminating the automobiles on the salesroom floor with theatrical effectiveness (Cardwell 1977: 221).

Before construction began on the [Earle C. Anthony] house in 1929, two smaller buildings--one for temporary living quarters that later became a guest house and the other a studio with a movie theater--were built in 1925 and 1927 respectively. Their design seems not to have been of much concern to Anthony, who was preoccupied with building his Packard showroom in San Francisco, completed in 1926, and his Oakland Packard showroom of 1928--both designed by Maybeck in association with John H. Powers and John H. Ahnden. In addition, Maybeck designed interiors for Anthony's Packard showroom and offices in Los Angeles, also built in 1928, for which John and Donald B. Parkinson were the architects. For all of these commissions the office of Maybeck and White prepared preliminary structural, mechanical, and electrical drawings according to Maybeck's schematics, which he then approved and turned over to the associated architects to complete. Maybeck then did the "art work," for which he billed Anthony separately.

Each of the Packard buildings had a glamorous showroom in front where the cars were displayed and a practical backstage where they were stored and serviced. In San Francisco (the only one that survives), the showroom was a single space with a high ceiling backed up with four floors of utilitarian character, which were largely encased in glass for maximum daylight (plate 176). Anthony's clever use of show-business tactics to market his cars was evident in the opening-night gala, attended by movie stars and broadcast by means of the two radio towers on the Packard building. Special lighting effects mimicking the atmospherics of a movie palace continued every night: a motor-driven switchboard controlled colored lights that were programmed to follow the course of the day from dawn to moonlight in twenty minutes.

To honor the building Anthony published a slim booklet titled A Saga of Transportation in April 1927. A drawing of a figure on a flying carpet gliding past one of the showroom columns graces the gold cover. The text, some of which is signed by Anthony and some not, reveals the hold that the "aristocrat of motordom" (by which Anthony meant the Packard, not himself) had on the public imagination: "The history of the mental and physical growth of the nations of the earth is, in the final analysis," he wrote, "a Saga of Transportation." In praise of Maybeck's design, he continued:

Maybeck has vitalized with his own dynamic personality the exotic influences which drift in through the Golden Gate from the Seven Seas....Discarding the shackles of architectural convention [he used] rose marble from Numidia and black from Belgium, travertine in tawny foam and glittering scaggiola--lanterns from a Persian Hareem--Spanish doorways and Gothic doorways--columns crowned with Corinthian acanthus supporting Byzantine corbels [to create] an Aladdin's palace in which the gorgeous panoply of the Arabian Nights vies with the luxury of the Middle Ages.

Maybeck reiterated his concerns about time's effects on his buildings many times, but never more pointedly than in the following statement about the two Packard buildings: "The frieze on the San Francisco Packard [building] should be multicolored like the paintings of Raphael in the Vatican. It was made to be treated that way [and] it must never be allowed to look faded. Oakland can look old--San Francisco must look snappy." (Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 177-80, 182, 235).

Maybeck's personal stamp on this Mediterranean-style building is evident in the handling of such elements as the spiral fire escape in its slot, the fenestration on the west facade, and the fence motif (Woodbridge & Woodbridge 1992: 115; Cardwell 1977: 245; Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 235).