Support the 2026 Hillside Club House
Capital Campaign
Bid now via our online auction
Auction items include: dinner at Chez Panisse, wines from Kermit Lynch, wonderful vacation rentals in Sea Ranch, Cambria, SF and Kirkwood, beautiful art and antiques, private historical tours, tickets to Berkeley Rep and much more!
The Berkeley Historic Building Fund and the Hillside Club are pleased to invite you to attend a very important fundraiser in support of our ongoing 2026 Hillside Club House Capital Campaign. On May 30, the Club will host a fantastic inaugural Garden Party in our new, completely redesigned backyard gathering space.
Join us for a fun-filled afternoon at the Hillside Club, enjoying convivial company and the beautiful views within our just-completed backyard retreat, featuring brick patios, a Maybeck-inspired redwood pergola, and a panoply of California native plants. We'll enjoy live music in the garden and in the Club House, festive food and drink, a short presentation on our proposed 2026 Club House improvements, and conduct a silent auction with a wide variety of wonderful items to bid on.
Tickets are limited so sign up soon to reserve your spot. Admission is $75 per guest (plus Eventbrite fees)
At the Berkeley Historic Building Fund, we aim to make a lasting impact on the future of Berkeley by identifying, repairing, renovating, restoring, and saving significant and historic buildings and properties within Berkeley, California.
Berkeley came into being as a satellite of San Francisco shortly after the Gold Rush had transformed the latter from a sleepy hamlet into the largest city on the Pacific Coast. In 1873, the five-year-old University of California inaugurated its Berkeley campus, seeking to become the Athens of the West.
In the 1890s, a group of young architects practicing in San Francisco combined Arts & Crafts principles with East Coast Shingle Style to create a new West Coast idiom that came to be known as the First Bay Tradition. These architects—Bernard Maybeck, Ernest Coxhead, Willis Polk, and Albert Schweinfurth—also left their mark on Berkeley, laying the foundation for the residential style popularly known as “Berkeley Brown Shingle.”
At the turn of the 20th century, Berkeley was home to the only public university in the western United States, drawing students and their families from far and wide. Intellectuals, artists, and business leaders settled here, attracted by the town’s geographical beauty as well as by the presence of the campus. As home sites opened for development north of the campus, a group of civic-minded residents formed the Hillside Club with the primary objective of educating newcomers on building with nature, a practice calling for site sensitivity, artisan craftsmanship, and the honest use of natural, locally sourced materials.
As a result of the Hillside Club’s advocacy, unpainted, shingle-clad houses soon proliferated in the hillside neighborhoods north of campus. The First Bay Tradition influenced architectural design in subsequent decades, as the Second Bay Tradition, followed by the Third Bay Tradition and even a Fourth Bay Tradition, left their stamp on Northern California’s built environment.
