A Berkeley Hillside Midcentury Gets a Second Act Written for One Owner

In Berkeley, California, a midcentury residence that reads like a perch among the branches has been brought forward without being flattened, the work of the interiors studio Aquilo and the architecture practice Butler Armsden. The brief was a careful one: keep the bones and the period character of a house with real history, and at the same time let it answer to the person who lives there, a founder from the technology world. That answer shows up in the details. A sunken seating well upholstered in velvet gives the main room a place to gather low and close, the kind of gesture the era did best and few renovations are brave enough to keep. Elsewhere the owner's working life is written straight onto the house, with a whiteboard surface built in rather than hidden away. The result is a home that still belongs to its decade and its hillside, but now also belongs unmistakably to its occupant. No sale price is on the record, and we do not estimate one.

With reporting from Architectural Digest.