Towns are a reflection of the people who erect them, their style an expression of the society from which they spring. In Inverness in the early 20th century, the architecture largely reflected Berkeley.
Professors, planners and other members of the city’s intelligentsia migrated westward to spend summers on the shores of Tomales Bay, bringing with them the Arcadian fantasies of the Arts and Crafts movement.
Inverness’s summer people built brown-shingle dwellings with exposed redwood interiors, rough-sawn posts and beams, and living rooms large enough to host artist salons around the fireplace. Houses were tucked into hillsides and valleys, sited on irregular lots and built to blend into the surrounding terrain.
In his forthcoming book, “Inverness by Design: How Berkeley Made a Summer Place,” Courtney Linn argues that this built environment was no accident.
Inverness, he writes, is “to a degree a doppelgänger of the Berkeley Hills,” shaped through cross pollination by many of the same families and design principles that made Berkeley one of the nation’s architectural treasure troves. The Berkeley-Inverness diaspora, he says, created “one of the best, most intact examples of an Arts and Crafts-inspired residential area found anywhere in California.”
A century ago, Inverness was to Berkeley what Cape Cod was to Greenwich Village or Mount Desert was to Cambridge: an out-of-the-way coastal retreat that filled for a dozen weeks each summer.
The families who built there belonged, as Mr. Linn writes, to “a sort of Brahmin class,” steeped in the Arts and Crafts movement as it was refracted through architects like Bernard Maybeck and Julia Morgan who created a Northern California brown-shingle vernacular.
“This book isn’t really about houses at all but how identity is formed by a sense of place, a sense of culture that emerges from honest materials, a natural landscape,” he told the Light.
A key source for Mr. Linn, who has lived part time in Inverness since 2021, was the archive of the late Mary Cardwell, who split her time between Berkeley and Inverness and meticulously documented the village’s historic structures. She catalogued information on who owned them, who designed them, when they were built and what style they represented.
As much a set of principles as a visual style, the Arts and Crafts movement was a rebuke to the Industrial Revolution and reached a boil during the late Victorian period in England. Its leading figures, John Ruskin and William Morris, were idealists and aesthetes who believed that mass production degraded both workers and consumers. At the heart of the movement was a utopian proposition: that one’s quality of life could be vastly improved by the physical elements that surround it—a room, a house, a garden.
Ruskin and Morris looked back romantically to the medieval town, with its artisan guilds, shared open spaces and humble materials. “This world that Ruskin and Morris idealized did not yet divide the thinker from the laborer,” Mr. Linn writes.
Their vision offered a radical alternative to the alienated labor of the factory and Western society’s unquestioning faith in material progress. The socialist undercurrent that ran through the English Arts and Crafts movement never took hold in quite the same way in the United States.
In Northern California, the movement found expression in hand-wrought houses built with local materials, organized around hearths and oriented toward the outdoors. That ethic appealed to the Berkeley set, whose politics and tastes were progressive and environmentally minded. They looked to the land itself as a source of American identity, and they saw the unpretentious houses they built in Inverness, fused with the unruly landscape, as an embodiment of democratic values.
One of Inverness’s early masterpieces was the Marsden House, built in 1906 at 80 Park Avenue and designed by Ernest Coxhead. Its shingled exterior, prominent overhanging roof and large dormer windows helped establish the vocabulary that would dominate the village’s architecture.
Many houses of the era were built on the mesa between First and Second Valleys, where wealthier summer residents settled. Middle-class summer people tended to live in First Valley, while year-round working people lived predominantly in Second Valley. For all the democratic ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement, Mr. Linn reports, there was little intermingling between the summer colony and those who lived in Inverness year-round.
Mr. Linn follows that contradiction and its unintended consequences over time. The children of the generation that built Inverness as a summer place became home-grown preservationists, absorbing environmental values and later applying them to the protection of Tomales Bay, the Inverness watershed and the Point Reyes peninsula. More than a century later, Inverness still looks remarkably like the summer place the earlier generation inhabited. But conservation came with exclusion.
As Inverness families worked to allay the threats of development and sprawl, they also helped create a place so rarefied that few could afford to live there.
“The Berkeley–Inverness diaspora of environmentalists recognized early on that the area contained the seeds of its own destruction,” he writes. “Its unspoiled beauty invited suburban sprawl and commercial development. They successfully contained those threats, but in doing so, they preserved a place so desirable that soon only the rich could afford to live there.”
“Inverness by Design: How Berkeley Made a Summer Place,” published by ORO Editions, is available at Point Reyes Books.