Okay,

Here goes my first blog entry on ActiveRain.

So I guess this is where I get to tell you about myself.... How boring is that.  I would rather talk about houses and Real Estate.

I am a huge fan of what has become known recently as "Storybook Style" homes.  This term came about due to the title of Arroll Gellner's excellent Coffee Table Book

 "Storybook Style: America's Whimsical Homes of the 1920s and 1930s"

I am one of the original members of Storybookers Yahoo group.  This group is an offshoot of John Robert Marlow's website Storybookers.  John is an science fiction author who lives in the Los  Angeles area and is equally as intereseted in Storybook Style.   I was one of the early scouts for his website and photographed many homes here in Northern California.

So, How exactly did I get so involved in this obscure architectural style?  I grew up in a home by Derry, Weaver and Derry.  To be more precise, I grew up in the home that Earl Derry built for himself and his wife Stella.  The Derry's lived there until 1946 when my grandmother Agnes purchased the house from him.  My father grew up in the house.  In 1962, my grandmother passed away and my parents inherited the home.  So this special home is the home I grew up in.

If you live outside of San Leandro, you probably have never heard of Earl Derry and his partners, brother Harold Thomas Derry and Brother in-law Phileas Beecher Weaver.  The pretty much built the majority of homes in the North East quarter of San Leandro. These are the Storybook Style homes in "The Broadmoor" and "Estudillo Estates" neighborhoods.  The also did homes in Hayward and near the Sequoyah Country Club in Oakland.  They also built home in the Lealand Heights neighborhood and Lebrun neighborhoods which have become parts of the Bay-o-vista neighborhood.

So, growing up in the builder/developer's own home, I always new we had a special home.  It sat on a double lot on one of the better streets in town "Superior Avenue".  The home has a big swoopy roof and a huge picture window and a towering fireplace to the right side and a low lying wing off to the left side.  Around the big picture window are bricks in a keystone style of pattern.

Then came the fire on Lewis Avenue behind our house.  It was Saint Patrick's Day in about 2002.  Father hadn't been home too long from the hospital from his stroke.  He doesn't move too well still.  We had gone out to dinner at Harry's Hof Brau and just gotten home.  (i'll have to blog about caregiving sometime) Rhea, our neighbor down the street rang our doorbell and was banging on our front door.  We opened the door and see told us that our tree was on fire.

Well, it wasn't our tree but the tree belonged to the house behind us on Lewis Avenue.  Not only was their 60 foor redwood or pine tree on fire but so was their garage.  It was a very windy march 17 night and the embers from the fire were flowing over home's roof like a river of lava from a hawaiian volcano.

due to additions in the 1980's to add-on some senior housing my my dad's aunt marie our home that once had a detached garage was now attached. The fire was only a few feet from the back of our garage.  Did I mention that our neighbor thought at one time it was a good Idea to store gas cans behind his (now buring) garage and the back fence.

The fire department all came down the wider more convenient Superior Avenue and came down our driveway to battle the fire.  Thanks to the gallant effort of the San Leandro Fire Department our house was saved.

The fire was a Sunday night and on that Wednesday night, my mother and I docented up at the Historic Dunsmuir Estate for an architectural history professor from San Francisco.  He gives tours of the mansion once a year to his classes.  After the tour, we asked him about this big swoopy roof, tall fireplace and wing off to the left side.  He went on to describe other features of our house to us.  It turns out we had a Storybook Style home. He recommended the Arroll Gellner book to us.

So I got a copy of the book through amazon.com and I start flipping through the pages of the book.  I was really not seeing too much similarities to the Hansel and Gretel Cottages pictured in the book.  Until that is until I came across the photo of the Montclair Library of the Oakland Public Library system.  It was practically a mirror image of our beloved home.

The caption was about 3 inches long beneath the photo.  It turns out that the Montclair Library was designed by somebody named C.C. Rosenberry who worked with Children's Charities in Oakland.  He designed it for a Chauncy Gibson and Mrs. Chas. Fischer of Kensington.  The Montclair Library was based on earlier works by an architect W.R. Yelland.

Ah-ha.

So, library 1930, our home 1927...earlier.  So I started researching William Raymond Yelland.  It turns out he's a famous arts & Crafts architect who's selected blueprints are in the collections of U.C. Berkeley.  Very good.  So I contact the U. C. Berkely architectural achives and start researching.  Armed with their listing of home in the collection I started many weekends of what I know call Yellanding.

The little Sacramento Delta town of Clarksburg according to the archive listings was a hot bed of Yelland Design.  The community church, the sugar refinery mill and about nine registered homes all by Yelland.  Hmmm sounds like a good place to start if any.   Well, we get into Clarksburg and the town looks like my neighborhood. These swooping roofs, called catslide roofs, are all over this town.  some of the houses look like they share an architectural DNA to our home.  Very positve.   Okay so now I am stoked about this.

More to come in next entry. 

If you need to contact me about this posting and have any questions call me, I,d love to talk about this subject.

510 334-7800