Florence Treadwell Boynton was no ordinary Berkeley mother. Described as "California's chief exponent of rhythmic gymnastics," she championed what she called "open air motherhood," a parenting philosophy that kept children outside as much as possible. She and Isadora Duncan had grown up together in Oakland, where Duncan began giving dance classes as young as ten, developing a theory of expressive movement that rejected the rigid postures of classical ballet. Florence absorbed these ideas and made the Temple of Wings their laboratory. The estate functioned as both family home and dance school, its colonnaded spaces perfectly suited to the free, flowing movements Duncan championed. From 1914 until 1985, an annual summer event called The Festival drew dancers and audiences to the hilltop property, sustaining a tradition of performance that lasted more than seven decades.

In 1923, fire destroyed the Temple of Wings. Everything burned except the reinforced concrete Corinthian-style columns, which stood among the ashes like the ruins of an ancient temple they had always been designed to evoke. Florence Boynton refused to abandon the site. She hired architects Clarence Dakin and Edna Deakin to rebuild within the framework of those surviving columns, and the result was something different from Maybeck's original: a two-story house constructed inside the colonnade, with the first level dedicated to multiple dance studios. The canvas walls were gone, replaced by more conventional construction, but the columns remained as the defining visual element. The rebuilt Temple of Wings was both a resurrection and a compromise, more sheltered than its predecessor but still structured around the idea that architecture should frame movement rather than contain it.

The property changed hands and purposes over the decades, but its most prominent later owners were billionaire philanthropist Gordon Getty and his wife Ann, who acquired the Temple of Wings in 1994. The Gettys furnished the estate with antique British and American Arts and Crafts movement furniture and Pre-Raphaelite paintings, transforming a dancer's open-air studio into a curated gallery of nineteenth-century aesthetics. The juxtaposition was striking: Maybeck's columns, born from the same early-twentieth-century idealism that produced Isadora Duncan's barefoot rebellion against convention, now framed paintings by the Victorian movement that had helped inspire it. After Gordon Getty's death, the estate was listed for sale and sold in 2024 for $5.85 million. Christie's handled the auction of the Gettys' art collection, valued at $180 million, with proceeds benefiting Bay Area arts and science organizations.

The Temple of Wings sits at 2800 Buena Vista Way in the La Loma Park neighborhood, a hillside enclave where Maybeck built several homes and where his influence shaped the architectural character of entire blocks. The city designated it Berkeley Landmark No. 173 on January 6, 1992, and it is listed in the California State Historic Resources Inventory. From the street, the columns are partially visible through mature eucalyptus and oak trees, hinting at the classical grandeur within. The estate remains a private residence, its dance studios silent now, but the structure still embodies the unlikely convergence of ideas that created it: a San Francisco architect's love of classical forms, an Oakland dancer's philosophy of freedom, and a Berkeley mother's conviction that her children should live as close to the outdoors as architecture would allow.