A love letter

I submitted the very best offer I could afford, 650K cash, AS-IS, with no inspections, bank approvals or holdups. The agent told me they liked my offer but wanted to make sure I was buying it as-is and that I wasn’t going to flip it because the trustees grew up there and were sentimental about the place. My agent suggested I write them a love letter. I wrote them a letter about how I’m going to lovingly restore their childhood home and not flip it and I got the house. A week after my offer was accepted, it still hasn’t fully sunk in.

The love letter:

To the Sellers of Mountain Blvd., Oakland, 

Hello my name is Evan Hart. I am an Oakland native and grew up in a wonderful craftsman house with dark wood trim in Rockridge.  It was a very idyllic place to grow up. This charming, sunny neighborhood of historic houses has left with me an indelible appreciation of 100 year old houses with hardwood floors, mahogany trim, dentil moulding and the like.

My father moved to the bay area in the early '70s and has been remodeling houses here ever since. I started working for him as a teenager where I began to build skills and knowledge. After I graduated from UC Davis 5 years ago, I came back to the bay area and began remodeling short sales and foreclosures.  People tend to think I flip houses, but that implies I do a fast, cheap job and make quick money.  None of those are characteristic of the work that I have done.  I have carefully restored 3 houses in that time and I have gone to great lengths and expense to restore the original character of the house.  Typically this involves re-imagining what used to be, as the houses I could afford were in such terrible condition that no one else wanted to deal with them.  Feeling a strong connection to the historic heritage of my home town, I felt that I was the one who had to restore them, whether I made money or not.

 The first house I did was a cute 1915 A frame craftsman house in the East of Lake Merritt area. This was a basic craftsman restoration.  I did the foundation, copper plumbing, period appropriate bathrooms with hexagon and subway tiles, and put new wood windows in the front with my best guess of what the originals looked like.  I made very little money.

The second house was a tiny 1921 hillside bungalow craftsman house near the Grand Lake Theater.  It was a similar restoration as the first, but needed very difficult foundation and structural work, much like the Mountain house, though on a smaller scale.  For that house I also had to replace the large single pane window in the front (a fad from the '50s/'60s) with a wood window that matched the style of the house, an XOX casement window with 6 over 1 lights.  I did not make much money on this house either.  The third house, my current house, is a large 1954 mid-century modern home in Redwood Heights in Oakland.  It was fun to play around with the style of the '50s and '60s - I incorporated new slab cabinets and daltile 4&1/4" square tiles into the design that pays tribute to the mid-century modern movement while connecting the house to contemporary-modern features like new insulated windows and LED lights.

As I hope I have made clear, I love Oakland's architectural heritage and I do everything I can to preserve the original style of the house while rebuilding the systems that allow the house to live on well into the future. 

But after 3 houses, I need to restore a house for myself.  What really excited me about the house on Mountain is how much of the stunning original style is intact.  It's really a thrill for me to see a house that needs to be nursed back to health rather than the absolute train-wrecks I have been working on.  Sure it needs serious work, but not needing to reinvent the house makes it very appealing.  The original style is priceless and beats my effort at re-imagining what isn't there any day.

 If you let me buy your house, I will carefully and lovingly restore and maintain the house inside and out so that it will be around for another hundred years and beyond.  I will not flip it.  I intend to do such tedious acts as removing the upstairs Tunisian tile in the upper bath, repairing the framing and moisture barriers, and re-setting the original tiles! It is this kind of tedium that I find rewarding and that will preserve the house in the long term.  What is missing from the house I will research and replace with what I determine best matches the original intent of the designer.

I hope that I have assured you that with me, your house will be in the best possible hands.  In a way it feels as though my career thus far has been preparing me for this very exciting project.

Thank you very much,

Evan Hart 

Research time

I went down to the Berkeley library of Environmental Design to see if I could find any mention in any of the many Maybeck books about Mrs. Kingsley, V. Rowland or the Mountain Blvd house. I came up with nothing but saw a lot of cool stuff. My favorite was the book containing only the microfilm prints of Maybeck’s drawings for the First Church of Christ, Scientist. It was about a hundred pages detailing every embellishment and detail on the entire building, down to the landscaping, stone angel details and the light fixtures which he simply drew, described the finish, and sent away to a lampmaker named Otar in Santa Cruz to bring his creations to life. I was blown away someone could draw an entire large church, with as much detail as a Gothic church, but with no one to give him guidance. I guess that’s why many called him a visionary architect. He has such a unique and refined sense of style, it’s baffling trying to figure out where this all comes from.

I went to the archives and had to make an appointment for the next week, after the offers were due. “Oh well,” I thought. I liked the house and wanted it whether or not I could prove it was a real Maybeck. I was already pretty convinced myself so I decided to simply try to put in a good as-is offer and hope for the best. I was starting to feel silly at this point spending all this time thinking about the house when I was also thinking I had no chance. I tried briefly to send in my offer early and think of other things but that didn’t work. I was obsessed.

It may be a Maybeck

The disclosures I got contained a lot of information. Quotes for hundreds of thousands of dollars of work that needed to be done. Great! Maybe that will weed some people out. I also read some interesting letters. One letter was about the builder of the house, Volney Rowland, and his relationship to Maybeck. Apparently they had met in 1924 in Berkeley and worked together closely for about 5 years. They even built Maybeck’s famous sack house, built of burlap sacks dipped in concrete. One of his weirdest experiments! It seems they were very close for a while. Another thing I found was a type-written letter from 1951 about a visit from the builder and architect of record V. Rowland to the current owners of the house. After reading through the disclosures a couple of times, I realized the PDF I had received was out of order. When a one page hand-written letter is taken out, the type written letter is three pages and clearly says, “[Mrs. Kingsley, original owner] selected her own architect - a Mr.Maybeck, a very famous artisan and her own builder, this Mr.Rowland.”

A REAL MAYBECK?! YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME! OK now there’s no way I’m getting this house. People read these disclosures, right?

As I looked through the disclosures, I noted the old copies of building permits explaining several additions. I began working on a theory. The original house is Maybeck. It says in the letter and is so cool and unique that I believe it. (Convincing someone else for a sale is another story but I didn’t plan on selling it any time soon.) Two additions were done in the ‘30s, also under the name Rowland and Rowland (son), and were less mind blowing. Under this theory - Maybeck designed the original house in 1926 or so (it’s listed as built 1927). In the ‘30s Rowland built the additions - the breakfast nook and the music room. Both were clad in tons of boards of this wood that looked like it had been eaten lengthwise by carpenter bees. Big black tough looking things capable of boring about a ½” hole through wood, about the size of my pinky. I called it bug board. Has a nice ring to it, eh?

Anyway, a logical progression seemed that Rowland had built the Mountain house to Maybeck’s drawings and then designed his own additions, somewhat Maybeck-like, later using this weird wood he seemed to be REALLY INTO. The back two bedrooms seemed to have no relation to the first design or Rowland’s design. These were done with a permit in ‘41. One room inside was clad in redwood 6” clap-board siding, which was a common material in the ‘40s but usually used for the outside of the house. The ceiling had exposed room framing but it was painted and used much smaller beams. The other bedroom had dark wood board and batten wall board on the inside and another similar painted ceiling and a slab door closet, characteristic of the 50’s 60’s mainly. These were similar to the doors in the master closet which was very odd and seemed to have a poorly made clerestory type windows in it like an Eichler.

The house was kind of a mess in terms of design so I began to dig deeper as the offer date approached. What do you do, in terms of remodeling and design, with a house that is 3/5ths a very famous architect with the back 2/5ths some random crap from the ‘40s and some unpermitted, poorly built stuff from the ‘50s or ‘60s? Do you carefully restore the original house, and do whatever the hell you want with the rest? Do you try, though destined to fail, at making the rear parts look like they are Maybeck? I had to get to the bottom of this to know what I was getting myself into.

It all began when...

I went to look at a house in Montclair in Oakland because I was shopping for a house. It was a craftsman, kinda arts and crafts or tudor looking from 1927 and this house looked like a fairy tale. An old, dusty, neglected fairy tale but a fairy tale nonetheless. More than one person at the second open house commented to me that it looked like the Swiss village in Disneyland. The house was undoubtedly magical. Part of this magic was the Alice in Wonderland big/small dynamic. The house looks somehow small from the outside and you enter into an entryway and are confronted with a tiny, maybe 16” door directly to the bathroom, a pretty unusual feature. Step down to the right and enter a bright, large living room with ancient looking wood trim with a tall exposed roof framing ceiling and a large central fireplace. Ample light is provided by many-lighted steel industrial windows filled with yellow glass. Enter the kitchen back up a couple steps and the ceiling drops down to about 8 feet and the small galley kitchenette looks cute in comparison but there is a large steel window stretching all the way to the floor with a door in the middle that opens up to a tiny balcony. The alteration between large and small makes you feel like you are shrinking and growing instead of the rooms, since most of us are used to flat, square, logical houses.

Another mysterious thing about the Alice in Wonderland effect is the disorientation of the floor plan. It takes many visits to fully grasp where the rooms are relative to each other. A typical floor plan for a basic 3/2 craftsman would be, as you enter, a living and dining room to one side and a stair well to the other going to the upstairs. Past the dining room would be the kitchen and near that a bathroom. In the back would be laundry and the back door. Upstairs you would have a hallway, another bath, and three bedrooms. It makes sense.

This house has a circular floor pattern. I have never seen this. One small loop is the entry, living room, kitchen, laundry, bath and back to entry. Another loop forms like a figure 8 to this loop. The hallway behind the bath can either go up to the master bedroom or continue to the music room. Enter the tall ceiling music room from a tiny hall and the same shrink/expand effect is happening again. Go up the stairs past the grand piano and enter the hall with the bedrooms and upper bath. If you continue, you can go into the master bedroom and down the stairs to the hallway. Master, stairs, hall, music room, stairs, hall, master. Another loop. That’s odd.

I loved it immediately for being so weird and cool and different. I decided to submit an offer an reread the listing. Maybeck style. Who is this Maybeck? Sounds familiar but…

Wow this guy is awesome! The Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Amazing. The First Church of Christ, Scientist in Berkeley. Absolutely brilliant and unique and unreal. That Church is the only national landmark in Berkeley and there are a LOT of very old cool buildings in Berkeley. I also read about his sack house, his cubby house, and some other just plain f*cking awesome hillside homes full to the brim of rich wood trim and a unique blend of old world styles with what seemed to be his own surreal touches.

I could see why someone would want to copy his style. But it was so “out there” that I had to know more...