Arts and Crafts Home in Berkeley Where Sustainability Reigns
Last July, as much of New York City life moved outdoors and into the streets, architect and urban planner Vishaan Chakrabarti, along with his Manhattan firm Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU), unveiled a proposal in The New York Times: Banish most privately-owned cars from Manhattan. Interestingly, that same month, he and his family were moving to what most people would consider a car place: Berkeley, California. There, Chakrabarti would serve as the new dean of U.C. Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design AD, 2021, Hannah Martin
“We didn’t want to suddenly have a car,” Chakrabarti says. He and his wife Maria Alataris, also an architect and founder of maa designs, have lived in Manhattan for 30 years and now have two teenage kids. “We’re not used to driving to get a quart of milk, or to drop a kid off at school. It’s just not the way we live.” So they landed in Elmwood, an old residential neighborhood just a twenty minute walk from the Dean’s Office at Berkeley, pretty close to their daughters’ school, and near a local BART station for easy access to San Francisco.
Alataris and Chakrabarti, who met as young, dressed-in-black architects in the offices of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, have lived in the sorts of places you would expect—a string of slick, city apartments; a cottage on Long Island, all filled with pieces by the likes of Mies, Eames, and Saarinen. But in Berkeley, they settled into something less expected: a historic property, originally built in the 1920s by architect Walter Ratcliff for an environmentalist of a different stripe.
Since they moved in, Alataris has been researching drought-resistance plants.) Thanks to its carved redwood paneling and elaborate eaves, Chakrabarti affectionately deems the place’s unique style “Beaux Arts and Crafts,” for its arts and crafts detailing paired with a more gracious, free-flowing floor plan. Eerily relevant, even, was a room they believe to be a sleeping porch—the house was completed just after the Spanish Flu—which the family has converted into a gym.
Ever conscious of their carbon footprint (the car their new life requires from time to time, mostly for roadtrips, is a Tesla), Chakrabarti and Alataris set to work making the home as self-sustaining as they could: a solar array for the large, south- and west-facing roof; converting heating and air conditioning to an electric pump. Thankfully, the house gets so much natural light they rarely flip the light switches before nightfall. “The only fossil fuels the house uses are gas for cooking and the fireplaces,” Chakrabarti says. Original windows were kept intact, and kitchens and bathrooms—last renovated in the 1980s—were all revamped with the help of local contractors MN Builder