The Morgan touch

When Ray Hendess was house-hunting in Petaluma in 1995, it was a certain Mediterranean with hipped roof and red clay tiles that caught his eye.

He had driven past the 1930s stucco at 210 West St., spotted a "For Sale" sign and contacted the Realtor.

"Initially, we thought that it looked like an interesting house with a great design," he recalls of the vintage home.

But certain details made it stand apart among the many beautiful old homes in west Petaluma, like the balcony inset into the second story behind an elegant loggia with arches and wrought-iron railing.

Vic and Kerstin Thuesen were similarly drawn to a stately 1925 Georgian Revival sitting on a prominent hilly lot at 14 Martha St. when they were looking to move up to Petaluma from Berkeley 28 years ago. The house was striking, with its latticed dormers, recessed portico and second-story balconies with Chinese laticework railings.

While exhibiting sharply different architectural styles, both shared a certain grace that can't easily be broken down into words.

Neither couple knew when they first set out to view the homes that they were designed by one of the West's pre-eminent architects, a prolific "cultural revolutionary" and master of both structural engineering and design, whose work includes the post-1906 Fairmont Hotel, the rustic Asilomar Conference Center in Pacific Grove and the spectacular Hearst Castle in San Simeon.

Her name was Julia Morgan, the first woman to be accepted into, and complete, the elite architecture program at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris (where she met her patron, mining heiress Phoebe Apperson Hearst) and the first woman in the United States to be a licensed architect practicing independently in her own studio.

But she was more than a feminist trailblazer, said Mark Wilson, who teaches art and architectural history at Santa Rosa Junior College and U.C. Berkeley Extension, and who documented and deconstructed Morgan's life and legacy in the book, "Julia Morgan: Architect of Beauty."

Published in 2007, it will be updated and released in paperback in March, in time for Julia Morgan 2012, a project of Landmarks California, which aims to promote history-based tourism. The consortium of historical and preservation groups hopes to inspire communities to celebrate and promote their own Julia Morgan landmarks.

Of the 750 buildings she designed over her 40-year career, more than 700 still stand, including at least four Wilson documented in Petaluma in cooperation with Lynn Forney McMurray, whose mother Lilian Forney was Morgan's longtime secretary and who inherited many of Morgan's renderings, papers and blueprints when she died in 1957.

Morgan also designed a New England-style Colonial at 15 Brown Court off D Street and a unique house at 707 D. Built in 1911, it seamlessly combines the seemingly disparate horizontal elements of the Prairie style that came out of the Arts and Crafts movement with half-timber trim reminiscent of Tudor Revival.

The only other Morgan in Sonoma County is the old Chapel of the Chimes mortuary at 2707 Santa Rosa Ave. It is believed, however, that Morgan only came up with the concept before turning it over to a draftsman. Wilson said Morgan also remodeled two homes in Petaluma originally designed by Brainerd Jones.

"She worked 18 hours a day, six or seven days a week," said Wilson. "She was on fire with creativity."

He maintains that Morgan, under-appreciated for years after her death in 1957 during the late-modern period of steel and glass boxes, deserves recognition as an artist who injected "elegance and sophistication" into her work, with a sensitivity to details. And unlike her contemporary, the unyielding Frank Lloyd Wright, she expressed her aesthetic within the vision, comfort and budget of her clients, he said. At the same time, her eclectic Beaux Arts education gave her the versatility to work in many architectural realms.

Thuesen said he has always been impressed with how the house beautifully captures light, assisted in no small measure by multiple French doors within the house and leading outside.

"There's a lot of space and the space is well organized," said Thuesen, who was persuaded to move up to Petaluma from Berkeley — where so much of Morgan's work survives, including the Berkeley Women's City Club — for the privilege of owning and living in "a Julia Morgan."

His house, he said, has always been an attention-getter, and has been featured in magazine ads, commercials and even a movie. A number of couples have posed for wedding photos in front of his Julia.

The use of light was a hallmark of the "First Bay Tradition," a design movement that took root in the Bay Area with Morgan's mentor, Bernard Maybeck. Like the Arts and Crafts movement, it was a reaction against the artificial excess of the Victorian era.

Wilson said Morgan was a leading practitioner of the design philosophy, which combined historical motifs with modern building materials and construction methods and sought to integrate homes with their surroundings while bringing the outdoors in with glass, balconies and decks.

You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com.