A perfect Berkeley stucco cottage, of the 3/2.5 variety, asking $995K and on the market about a month. Designed by Henry Gutterson in 1935 for Frank Gray and directly on Bernard Maybeck's Rose Walk. Gray was Rose Walk's second owner-developer. Not a bad pedigree. It's late Gutterson, as his career was winding down from being the supervising architect of St. Francis Wood and spending more time helping finish Bernard Maybeck's projects. It was also the Great Depression. Here Gutterson produced a very simple, unpretentious and beautifully proportioned small stucco house, a form that had evolved enough that it was no longer Mediterranean but completely Californian.
From an urban planner's point of view, Rose Walk is one of those alluring semi-urban projects that got completed, with single family and multiple dwellings arranged along a car-free path.You walked through a garden to get to your garage or the (then, not now) trolley to go to work or shop, and it runs across a downslope, so the buildings are massed in a deliberately picturesque manner, overlooking a now-covered reservoir. The realtor's virtual tour includes exquisite vintage floor plan porn color pDFs of Gutterson's original drawings for Dr. Gray's house.
Rose Walk took twenty years to accomplish, interrupted by World War I, a fire, and the Great Depression. So yes, it's sort of a miracle. Rose Walk was first designed by Maybeck in 1913. The Grays acquired the property on either side after the great 1923 fire, and the nearby Rose Garden was a WPA project, built from 1933 to 1937 along conceptual lines suggested by Maybeck. Worth a visit, especially in June.
·2500 Rose Walk [Redfin]
·Henry Gutterson [Western Neighborhoods Project]
·Berkeley Rose Garden [BAHA]
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