John Weston Havens Jr. was the last direct descendant of Francis Kittredge Shattuck, the man who founded Berkeley. Shattuck had made his fortune in the young city, and a portion of that fortune eventually passed to Havens, who knew exactly what he wanted to do with it: build a beautiful house. Not just any house -- Havens wanted a home suited to his particular life. He entertained frequently, collected antique Asian art, listened to music with serious attention, and played badminton in a courtyard surrounded by plants. He needed rooms that could display delicate ceramics and host lively dinner parties in equal measure. In 1938, he commissioned Harwell Hamilton Harris, a Los Angeles architect who had studied under Richard Neutra and was developing a distinctly Californian interpretation of Modernism. Harris was not yet famous. The Havens commission would become one of his defining works.

Harris built the house of unfinished redwood, letting the wood's natural warmth and grain serve as both structure and ornament. Douglas fir trusses -- three inverted triangles working in concert -- support the roof, main floor, and lower levels, distributing the building's weight across the steep slope without requiring massive foundations. The engineering is bold but the effect is quiet. From inside, you barely notice the structure. What you notice is the view. The large windows wrap the living spaces in a continuous panorama of the Bay, and the boundary between interior and exterior blurs in the California light. Architectural critics have compared the house to Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, and the comparison is apt: both buildings cantilever dramatically over their landscapes, both use natural materials to soften the audacity of their engineering. But where Fallingwater commands a Pennsylvania waterfall with horizontal authority, the Havens House does something gentler. It leans into the hillside and looks out, as if the house itself is contemplating the view.

Havens was a gay man, and the house he built has become significant in architectural scholarship for what it reveals about the relationship between domestic space and identity. Scholars have referenced the Havens House in studies of queer space -- the ways in which LGBTQ individuals have used architecture and interior design to create environments that reflect lives that mainstream culture did not always accommodate. The house was intensely private, set on a hillside lot that offered both seclusion and spectacle. Its courtyard, where Havens played badminton among dense plantings, was invisible from the street. Its entertaining spaces, by contrast, opened dramatically to the panorama. The design allowed Havens to control exactly what the world saw and what it did not. He lived in the house for more than sixty years, from 1940 until his death in 2001, changing almost nothing in the interior. The unfinished redwood aged around him, darkening slowly over the decades.

When Havens died, he bequeathed the house to the University of California. The UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design now maintains the property, providing limited access for tours and educational programs. Original architectural drawings and related materials are preserved in the Environmental Design Archives on campus. The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on June 11, 2008. But preservation has not been simple. Unfinished redwood, for all its beauty, is vulnerable to weather. Winter storms in 2002 caused damage that required significant repair, and the ongoing challenge of maintaining a sixty-plus-year-old wooden structure on an exposed hillside is considerable. The house has never been significantly altered -- a remarkable fact given its age -- which means that visitors today see essentially the same rooms, the same wood, the same panoramic views that Havens enjoyed when he first moved in during the early months of World War II. It is a rare thing: a private house that has survived intact long enough to become a public monument, its architecture still as radical as the day the trusses were raised.