By Courtney Linn

The author Courtney Linn was invited by Marin County historian Dewey Livingston to write about Inverness’ (California) early residents and the houses they built. Many came to Inverness to enjoy the natural beauty of the Point Reyes landscape and built modest adaptations of Brown Shingle houses once commonly seen in places such as Berkeley, CA. Inverness to this day retains its early architectural character. In the words of architectural historian Daniella Thompson, its houses are, on the whole, the “least disturbed” of the Bay Area’s surviving Brown Shingle houses.

Two of the earliest historic houses, Crow’s Nest and Edgemont, are still used as residences, thanks to renovations by Thayer Hopkins Architects. Reflecting on the Crow’s Nest and Edgemont projects, Mr. Hopkins credits the Draper family, who have owned the property since the 1960s, for their commitment to save and preserve the houses to the extent practicable. He remarked: “One of the things I loved about this collaboration— client-architect-builder—was that it replicated the essence of the Arts and Crafts movement—not just in the product but in the process: working out every detail together with respect for the materials and the craft, the ways things used to be done.” 

The First Morgan House (Crow’s Nest) 1895 

Ben and Mattie Morgan lived in Berkeley during most of the 1880s and 1890s. The Morgans originally built a house (the first Morgan House) on Inverness’s Park Avenue in 1895. It was a simple two-story structure with a gable roof, board-and-batten exterior siding, and single-wall construction with open studs and no interior finish. The wood frame rested directly on the ground and used various tree roots as a makeshift foundation. Taking rusticity to a new extreme, several tree trunks served as interior posts. Like many Inverness houses of this era, the house acquired a name: Crow’s Nest. 

The Draper family later acquired Crow’s Nest. The original house was demolished in 1999. It was too fragile to be renovated. Thayer Hopkins, an architect and grandson of Warren Charles Perry, the long-time Dean of the College of Architecture at UC Berkeley, designed a Shingle Style house to take its place. In the new structure, Hopkins repurposed the original house’s redwood boards and the clinker bricks from the chimney. The new structure retains the gabled roof and other design elements from the original house. 

The Second Morgan House (Edgemont) 1904 

In 1904, the Morgans moved into Edgemont, a house that was designed and built by Berkeley contractor Leslie Roberts. It is a two-story, hip-roofed, with what Mattie Morgan termed “cladding shakes” for exterior siding and “cladding shingles” for the roof. The house is situated on the bluff overlooking Tomales Bay. In its design, Edgemont incorporates many elements of Berkeley brown-shingle houses of the era. Berkeley brown-shingle houses were considered the original party house and Edgemont was designed very much in that spirit.

The Drapers undertook a major renovation of Edgemont beginning in 1996 under the supervision of Thayer Hopkins. The renovation retains essential elements of the original design and adds period-appropriate enhancements. One such enhancement is the stepped fenestration, an architectural feature seen in several of Bernard Maybeck’s Brown Shingle designs. Every original brick was saved, carefully cleaned, and re-purposed in the new fireplace and chimney. The house had a great deal of darkened redwood in the wall paneling, moldings, and trim. All the wood was saved, carefully milled, and re-purposed throughout. The original baseboards, for instance, were over an inch thick, 20 inches high, and had 20 years of growth rings in every inch of board, indicating that the wood was harvested from a tree that was hundreds of years old. 

Historic properties, when preserved, respected and enhanced, anchor a community and place to its past. Owners who commit to the restoration of legacy houses support the connection to a common past that may have been otherwise lost