The Bay Area Home of a Famed Experimental Physicist Just Hit the Market for $1.4M

Location: 775 San Diego Rd, Berkeley, California

Price: $1,425,000

Architect: Donald Olsen

Year Built: 1952

Footprint: 1,904 square feet (3 beds, 2 baths)

Lot Size: 0.4 acres

From the Agent: "At 775 San Diego Road, directly across from John Hinkel Park, the Kip House is one of the remarkable early residential works of Berkeley modernist Donald Olsen. Designed in 1952 for UC Berkeley physicist Arthur Frederic Kip, the house belongs to a formative moment in Olsen’s career, when the principles of European modernism, particularly the Bauhaus, were finding a new expression in California. Olsen embraced the Bauhaus’s emphasis on clarity, functional planning, and the elimination of unnecessary ornament. Those ideas would remain fundamental to his work, but in Berkeley they took on a distinctly Californian character: more open to landscape, more informal in their organization, and deeply responsive to climate and site. More than seventy years later, it is striking how modern the Kip House feels. Its clean geometry, expanses of glass, and remarkably fluid plan still read as contemporary. Olsen used the slope of the site to create a sequence of subtly changing levels. The approach leads to an intermediate level containing the kitchen and dining spaces. The kitchen opens directly to the dining room and continues outward into a secluded English garden. From this central level, the plan rises to a raised living room and study, while two of the bedrooms occupy the lower portion of the house. The Kip House makes the ideas of the past feel relevant today: open living, connection to landscape, efficient use of space, privacy without enclosure, and architecture that responds closely to its site."