John Hudson Thomas Self Guided Tour

Originally presented Sunday, May 6, 1979By the Ecole Bilingue, the East Bay French-American School This tour of seven classic Berkeley homes by architect JohnHudson Thomas was preceded by a slide lecture given May 3 byThomas Gordon Smith at the Northbrae Community Church(designed by John Hudson Thomas).The Ecole Bilingue, located at 1009 Heinz St., is also by JohnHudson Thomas.The following text is from the tour handout.

Overview Page

[Added in 2009]1. Kruse House, 564 Santa ClaraAve., 19142. Spring Mansion, 1960 SanAntonio Road, 19123. Pratt-Verper House, 959 IndianRock Ave., 19114. Pratt-Thomas House, 800Shattuck Ave., 19115. Blum House, 1505 HawthorneTerrace, 19266. Park House, 3115 ClaremontAve., 19147. Wintermute, 227 Tunnel Road,19138. Ecole Bilingue, 1001/9 Heinz St.,1915Find the tour on GoogleMaps. (Google Map createdin 2009.) You can also viewit and fly from house tohouse in Google Earth,once you’ve found it inGoogle Maps.You can also find photos of houses by John HudsonThomas on theJohnHudson Thomas Flickr feed,the John Hudson ThomasJournal (a blog) or theJohn Hudson Thomas gallery.

John Hudson Thomas (1878 to 1945)

Jonathan Thomas was one of Berkeley's most innovative andprolific architects. Born in Nevada, Thomas spent his boyhoodinthe Bay Area -- until he left for Yale University. After graduationfrom Yale, he returned to Berkeley to enter the Department of Architecture at the University of California, where he studiedunder such masters as Bernard Maybeck and John Galen Howard.Thomas completed the three-year architecture course and wentto work as a draftsman in Howard's office. Two years later heformed a business partnership with Howard's office supervisor,George T. Plowman; and in 1910 he established his ownindependent practice.During the four-year period in which Plowman and Thomas werepartners, they were associated primarily with the Craftsmanmovement of architecture. Their small-scale buildings were madeof wood and were rustic in nature.When Plowman left Berkeley for Los Angeles, Thomas shifted hisdesign approach from the unpretentious Craftsman to a moreassertive style. His residences became dominant in relation totheir landscapes, and wood gave way to stucco for their façades.The stucco acquired the appearance of more solid masonry, andThomas created a feeling of massiveness for his structures byincorporating such techniques as overscaled elements. Manytimes he designed separate windows to appear from the exterioras one grand unit. His interiors, also, became more dramatic withsuch features as prominent stairways. In his designs, Thomasselected motifs from many different sources and attempted tocombine them into a unified statement. In fact, this tendency tocombine seemingly unrelated imagery into a cohesive designcertainly became one of Thomas' trademarks.The style set by John Hudson Thomas established the tone forEast Bay residential development throughout the early part of the20th century. Helping to establish the Bay Area Tradition inarchitecture, Thomas continued his practice until his death in1945. Commentary by Linda Hayes