• Hume Castle in Berkeley, California

    note: article updated with new image & details
    Screen shot 2010-10-06 at 12.42.27 PM

    2900 Buena Vista Way in Berkeley, California is home to a rather unique property, one which many local residents don’t even know about given its location on a hillside high above street level and the fact that it’s almost completely shrouded in olive and pine trees.

    Originally built in 1927 for Samuel James Hume and Portia Bell Hume – the former professor of theater arts at the University of California and the latter a pioneer in the field of community psychiatry – Hume Cloister was designed by John Hudson Thomas based on a very specific 13th-century Augustinian monastery in Toulouse, France.

    I’ll try to get some pictures from the inside – maybe the owners have a few photos they wouldn’t mind sharing with us. All I know is that the interior details are pretty incredible – enormous wrought iron chandeliers, a deep wishing well, a beautiful cloister, spiraling stone staircases. It sounds terrific!

    There aren’t many images of the house available online, and not many other textual references either; this fellow lived in the area and writes a bit on it, and includes some maps and pictures; the home sits on a tract of land known as La Loma Park; finally, Hume may have been involved in this staging of Henry VI, which took place on the property. I’ll post contemporary pictures if I can find some!

  • John Hudson Thomas

    There’s been a resurgence of interest lately in one of my favorite Bay Area architects, a fellow who was just as comfortable with classically Arts & Crafts structures as he was with Art Deco, Mission Revival and less orthodox (or harder to pigeonhole) styles.

    John Hudson Thomas grew up in the Bay Area and returned to Berkeley after graduating from Yale. While in the Architecture MA program at Berkeley, he studied under and became friends with both Bernard Maybeck and John Galen Howard, and worked for Howard for a few years after graduation.

    A member of Berkeley’s Hillside Club, he socialized with Maybeck, Julia Morgan and others, and certainly elements of their own styles are visible in his early work. He was especially interested in the tall, thin and somewhat whimsical forms of European designers like Mackintosh and Voysey, and incorporated these lines – along with those of the fledgeling Prairie movement and those of the Viennese Seccessionists – into his own style, which in more recent years been called part of the "First Bay" school. Eventually, his work became a bit softer and more orthodox, but he still kept his knack for interior architecture – lots of detail – and tall structures with long uninterrupted lines well into the 1920s and 30s.

    By this time, he was working for more established clients, on more complex and high-paying projects – mostly large homes – but his attention to landscape, environment and view was still paramount, and slightly odd or purposely out-of-place elements – friezes, odd finishes, unexpected combinations of materials, nooks and crannies and whimsical woodwork – remained. Luckily, many of his best buildings are still standing; a few are listed below:

  • Realty Advocates: the under-pricing epidemic

    Brett Weinstein and Hal Feiger sell real estate in the San Francisco Bay Area. Their firm, Realty Advocates, advertises "full real estate services at reduced fees," and they really do approach their jobs as a trade and craft and not just a get-quick scheme – Hal is very active in the development of non-profit affordable housing in the area, and even found the synagogue I grew up with (Rabbi Burt officiated my Bar Mitzvah!), Kehilla, a permanent home in the East Bay. Brett, on the other hand, has worked as a carpenter and general contractor, and knows a lot more about quality construction than most of the agents I interact with. Basically, I’d buy a house from these guys.

    Recently, they added a blog to their site; one recent article caught my eye. Read the complete article at their site:

    You know the practice: suggesting, or going along with a seller’s
    idea, that the best way to obtain the highest price in the sale of a
    house is to deliberately ask a price that is well below what you expect
    it to sell for. A more odious variation: agreeing to list a property at
    a price the seller has told you he would not accept. You figure this is
    pretty safe: everything gets bid up these days. The SF Chronicle
    recently dubbed this the “under-pricing epidemic.”

    Sometimes this practice is blatant, as when the
    agent puts in the confidential remarks section of the MLS: “seller
    reserves the right to reject any and all offers.” Other times, it is
    hidden, as when offer day comes and you, the buyer’s agent, deliver the
    only offer. You are then countered at a price ten of thousands, and
    sometimes, hundreds of thousands of dollars more than the asking price.
    In essence, the buyer is being told to bid against himself.

  • East Bay (California) homes for sale

  • Redfin: find, buy & sell homes online

    Redfin is a real estate listing service with an integrated blog, which gathers neighborhood information, maps, photos and other information on a particular for-sale property all into a nice neat package. They bill themselves as "the industry’s first online real estate brokerage," and brings the whole web 2.0 package to MLS listings. And unlike customer-hostile realtors and newspapers who hide MLS listings behind layers of logins, security measures and other barriers to a halfway decent customer experience, Redfin puts the listings themselves right there in front of you, to browse and bookmark and share as you see fit.

    A recent listing in their San Francisco Bay Area section shows a small, attractive, and – as usual – ridiculously overpriced bungalow in one of my favorite Berkeley neighborhoods. Unlike other real estate tools, though, Redfin is much more upfront and honest about pricing, forgoing hype for honesty; they point out that $602 per square foot is just short of criminal, and present alternatives like this more expensive overall but only $396 per square foot home with a beautiful view just up the hill.