The third episode in my HERE series is now online. This video was set to be the first in this series. Its first pass was completed before HERE1 and HERE2 were even started. In doing this first pass, I learned a number of lessons and techniques that translated into making HERE1 and HERE2 better efforts. So I shelved the Maybeck video until now.
My interest in delving into the Maybeck houses began a decade ago when I offered it as a tour through my daughter’s high school silent auction. We drove around, looked at and talked about these five houses from the outside. It has taken my making this video for me to come to terms with what I believe Maybeck accomplished in these homes.
Maybeck’s opus and career still confound me in its ups and downs. He begins as a young, idealistic architect in the early 1890’s, slowing befriending Charles Keeler who he meets on their daily ferry boat commutes between San Francisco (work) and Berkeley (home). In the mid 1890’s he is working as the director of the Architectural Section of the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art atop Nob Hill. Eventually Maybeck tells Keeler that he will design Keeler’s new home for free.

Around this time he meets Phoebe Apperson Hearst and eventually persuades her to underwrite an international architectural competition for the Master Plan design of the new University of California at Berkeley. For these efforts, Maybeck is Mrs. Hearst’s advisor, and hence removes himself from competition eligibility. Mrs. Hearst likes his work and commissions Maybeck to design her Wyntoon estate which will be the largest residential commission that he will ever receive.

A couple of years later, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake occurs. The five houses in HERE3 can be seen as a part of the residential, post-quake rebuilding effort and a part of the continuing growth of San Francisco. All but the Castanada house are complete by the time of the 1915 Pan Pacific International Exposition that was sited on what is now San Francisco’s Marina District.
It has seemed to me that Maybeck’s architectural practice subsides within 5 years after the quake. In a massively rebuilding San Francisco, he receives only the residential commissions noted in this video and a small, but charming set of bookstores. He receives no large San Francisco commercial or public commission, though in this period he does some of his best East Bay projects. By 1913, he is working for architect Willis Polk as a draftsman. Polk has large downtown office buildings and huge Bay Area estates (e.g.. the Caroland’s estate in Hillsborough) on his drawing boards. Polk is also doing the bulk of the upcoming 1915 Exposition. Apparently overwhelmed, Polk holds an internal competition in his drafting room for the design of the Palace of Fine Arts building. Maybeck wins that competition. Thereupon Polk gives that commission to Maybeck.
In my re-editing of the Maybeck video, I have been intent on delineating a clearer understanding of the impact I now see Maybeck having make in his San Francisco houses. Along the way, I have found two additional Maybeck San Francisco homes, if you do not count his residential neighborhood centers. One is in Forest Hills, designed in 1917 for Dahlia Loeb, later added onto by other architects.

Another resides on the ridge of a hill near the Masonic Avenue home, designed in 1917 for Alice Gay.

During this San Francisco work, Maybeck moved his own home from the cottage he remodeled in the Berkeley flatlands in the 1890’s to a hillside home he built on a large plot of land he purchased in the Berkeley Hills. And a decade after the San Francisco homes, his own home was destroyed in the 1922 Berkeley Firestorm. What he rebuilds on his hillside after that fire is quite different from what preceded it. This difference will be the subject of a future HERE episode that looks at the post mid-life homes of several architects.














