Preserving history to create a more beautiful future

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.