It was a house with a mystery past and an uncertain future. And it would take two neighbors - one next door and the other up the street - to unravel its secrets.
The man who owned the aging, two-story, Stickley-style Craftsman at 930 Mendocino Ave. in Santa Rosa in 2004 dearly wanted to restore it. But he just didn't have the means and his health was slipping. So he approached his next-door neighbor, Trae Seely, to see if he had any interest in buying and restoring it.
He went to the right guy.
Seely heads up a commercial construction company that builds distinctive branded interiors for national retailers all over the country, everything from Chanel and Brookstone to Jamba Juice and Starbucks. He also has a special thing for old homes, particularly those with brown shingles, like this house. He jumped at the chance, inviting contractors who did work for him around the country to fly to Santa Rosa and apply their best skills to bringing the century-old home back to its original beauty.
"It was funky, dark, overgrown, with wisteria growing everywhere," Seely said. "But you could see there was potential there."
Inside, the house was a disaster. The previous owner, an attorney, was pretty much living out of one room, having filled the rest of the house floor-to-ceiling, as well as the back patio, with stuff.
"It was absolute squalor," Seely recalled. "I filled 10 40-yard dumpsters with trash."
It was a sad state for a house that Seely later came to learn had a very distinguished beginning. Another neighbor, Jeff Elliott, a Santa Rosa history buff who is completing restoration of another grand Mendocino Avenue home, The Comstock House, uncovered the story of 930 Mendocino.
Architectural observers had speculated that the 1908 home was the work of Julia Morgan, who did homes in Petaluma, or Brainerd Jones, who turned out a large number of houses in Petaluma and Santa Rosa. Elliott, however, did some sleuthing and uncovered the truth: It was designed by Mary Rockwell Hook, a little-known contemporary of Morgan, who lived and did most of her work in Kansas City. Hook designed the house for her sister, Florence Edwards, whose husband, James, was a prominent banker and mayor of Santa Rosa in 1910.
Elliott found a passing reference to the project buried in Hook's 1970 memoir, "This and That."
Like Morgan, Hook fought to attend the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The tenacious and talented Morgan was the first woman admitted to the school's architecture program. Hook, who was the only female student in the architectural department of the Art Institute of Chicago, traveled to Paris and became only the second woman to take the qualifying exam. She failed, but was accepted by an associated atelier to apprentice.
Elliott says she designed the Mendocino Avenue home in the shingle-style "First Bay Tradition" practiced by Morgan, Bernard Maybeck and Brainerd Jones, who did many North Bay buildings in the early 1900s.
She was a fan of sleeping porches and created a screened porch on the second story of the Edwards home that is as large as a bedroom. Seely maintained the porch, but enclosed it with windows.
Seely confesses that he spent more than $300,000 restoring the home, with its bank of six dormer windows in front, sturdy roof corbels, distinctive porte cochere along the north side and Juliet balcony. In the process, which included a new foundation, he changed very little. One upstairs bedroom was divided into two but the original footprint, front and interior Arts & Crafts doors with alabaster stained-glass and butler pantry featuring a large wall of glassed-in shelves for sister Florence's china collection (much of her wedding china had been trashed in the 1906 earthquake) remain.
Interestingly, Hook created a beautiful, well-lit kitchen for her sister, unusual for the time, when many kitchens, designed by men, were dark and hidden. Seely also kept the kitchen very much as it was.
The house now is used for professional offices, something that is not readily apparent since the original foyer is unchanged and bedrooms have simply been turned into offices.
For his careful efforts, Seely received an award of merit from the city of Santa Rosa.
Inge Horton, the author of a book entitled "Early Women Architects of the San Francisco Bay Area," said while Hook never achieved the level of distinction of Julia Morgan, she was a pioneer for women in architecture who created sturdy homes designed for comfortable living, reflecting the needs and desires of her clients. One of her most noteworthy projects is the Pine Mountain Settlement School in Kentucky, which still stands today.
You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com.
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