Oakland Hills Residence

The Oakland Hills house was originally designed and built in 1954 by noted Berkeley architect Roger Lee who built a good many stout, disciplined and well-proportioned modernist homes in the Bay area during the 1950’s and 1960’s.  This house is built on a steep hillside site in the Oakland hills looking west across downtown Oakland, the Bay Bridge and out to the full panorama of San Francisco and the surrounding waters. During the preceding fifty years, the house became quite neglected and suffered a good deal of water and insect damage requiring a tearing back to the bare frame.  Our challenge was to restore, rebuild and transform the house within the design character, material palette, and logic of the original.

While much in the house is entirely new, it is all woven together with existing frames, mullions, jambs and siding wherever they could be saved and any over-restoration was carefully avoided so that important aspects of the patina of age was maintained. Nothing was made to intentionally mimic oldness, and many of the steel details and woodwork details are entirely new.  Everything new is constructed with the same workmanlike avoidance of superfluous craft or fussiness that was a compelling characteristic of the original.  The result is a house entirely transformed in its sense of space and light, in its integration of indoor and outdoor spaces, and in its accommodation of natural cooling and pleasant, light-filled living.  It would be very hard for anyone but the architect, owner and builder to discern what is old and what is new.  We hope that the original architect, the late Roger Lee, would consider it a logical and respectful collaboration with his original design; an appropriate collaboration between serious colleagues across a space of time.