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Channeling Bernard Maybeck

The Stories History of the Grand Guy Hyde Chick Home

    Foster Goldstrom always knew he wanted to own a grand residence one day, but when a real estate agent told him about a historic home for sale in the Oakland Hills, the price sounded too steep. He drove from his home in San Francisco to 7133 Chabot Road to take a look anyway.
    “I walked in, looked to the left, looked to the right and said, ‘I’ll take it,’ ” says Goldstrom, a retired art dealer who has owned galleries in San Francisco, Dallas and New York.
    Back in 1979 when he purchased the house, Goldstrom didn’t know a lot about the architect who’d designed it, Bernard Maybeck. Now he’s a studied Maybeck scholar and admirer. Perhaps best known for his design of the San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts and Berkeley’s First Church of Christ Scientist, Maybeck also designed many homes in the Berkeley and Oakland hills.
    Goldstrom’s home is one of Maybeck’s largest. Built for the Guy Hyde Chick family in 1914, it has had several owners since the Chick family sold it in 1921. The style can best be described as eclectic Gothic-Craftsman. Nestled among a grove of live oaks, the exterior features a gabled roof that extends a few feet beyond the edges of the house and is further enhanced by trellises and lovely wood details such as sawtooth shingles. The house exudes an air of simplicity, elegance and strength.
    “Maybeck really had an understanding of the human spirit; he built houses to make the person feel rich and alive, no matter how big the house was,” says Goldstrom. “He understood feng shui long before it was part of popular conscience.”
    The effect the house had on Goldstrom the first time he walked in is understandable. The entry hall bisects the home, and the views to both sides are spectacular. To the right is a dining room, to the left a large living room, both with high ceilings, original redwood details and floor-to-ceiling French doors that offer glimpses of the surrounding gardens. Maybeck believed in blending the indoors and outdoors, quite a novel concept for his time (1892-1940), and the effect is apparent. Through carefully placed windows and doors, there seems to be no boundary between the indoors and the attractive gardens surrounding the home.
    The downstairs quarters are ideal for entertaining, as the floor plan seems to lead one from one magnificent room to another. The high walls handsomely show off Goldstrom’s impressive art collection. Even as you walk up the stairs, there are carefully placed windows that allow perfectly framed glimpses of a gorgeous oak tree or another garden scene. Upstairs the house features three bedrooms, which Maybeck liked to refer to as “sleeping porches.” The bedrooms are filled with light from rows of windows set under the eaves of the gabled roof.
    Goldstrom hasn’t had to do much in the way of maintenance over the years. “It was so well built that it’s only moved an inch and a half in 92 years,” he says.
    Almost everything in the home is still original, and it all still works, including the gorgeous redwood pocket doors downstairs and all the original wood windows throughout the home. The bathrooms and the kitchen have been redone, and beautifully at that.
    In renovating the kitchen, Goldstrom says he really tried to “channel Maybeck.” The old-growth redwood cabinetry fits in stylishly with the rest of the house. The large Aga range centers the room and gives just the right feel to the space. Even the bench seat that Goldstrom painstakingly designed to fit in with Maybeck’s ideals looks as if it’s original. Years after he had it installed, Goldstrom found an almost identical-looking bench in photographs of another home Maybeck had designed in Marin.
    Goldstrom knows he’s lucky to still have the home. Though the 1991 Oakland Hills fires burned down homes for miles in every direction, miraculously the Guy Chick house stood unharmed. “I had basically kissed my house goodbye and ran down the hill, only to return five hours later to see it standing there among piles of gray ash,” says Goldstrom. “It was surreal.”
    A few other events have left Goldstrom wondering if the house is somehow blessed with some special protection. Last year, a large oak tree landed directly on the house but did not damage it. Now that he’s retired, Goldstrom lives in Vienna part of the year. “When I’m here though, I rarely leave my house and garden,” he says. “What better place is there to go?”