"Located in Berkeley's Chabot canyon, the Chick house is sited on a large piece of gently sloping land covered by a superb growth of California Live Oaks....Walks and terraces create a transition space between the house and garden and, by providing large sliding glass doors, Maybeck made it easy for the occupants to move from one into the other....Renaissance design and Beaux-Arts training have produced many superb examples of gardens complementing building forms, but the scale and the sensitivity of Maybeck's design often had a greater affinity with Japanese work which combines natural and constructed environments into one inseparable design."

— Kenneth H. Cardwell. Bernard Maybeck: Artisan, Architect, Artist. p167.

The Creator's Words

"I have never been an architect, I just like one line better than another."

— Bernard Maybeck. from Esther McCoy. Five California Architects. p2.

"He had no fondness for the axial symmetry of the Renaissance, for the appropriate plan meant too much to him—plan was 'the backbone of anything beautiful.' "

— Esther McCoy. Five California Architects. p3