Radiantly Revamped Home & Garden

This Crocker Highlands Tudor presents refinements across its three-bedroom, two-bathroom interior, detached media bungalow-office, and celebrated grounds, featured on garden multiple tours. Perfectly preserved 1920’s architectural elements grace the interior: mahogany woodwork, hardwood flooring, and casement window arrays. Revitalization, including a new bathroom and kitchen transformation, dovetails seamlessly with the home’s period appeal. Extending its living space, French doors open to a deck ringed by gardens exuberant with colorful California natives and mature trees.

Picturesque Trestle Glen, lined with period architecture, uniform trees and vintage streetlamps, conceals wiring underground. Residents savor the setting and its walkability and bikability to Lakeshore and Park Boulevard cafes, shops, Farmer’s Market, Lake Merritt recreation, and Crocker Highlands Elementary.

In an advantageous single-level floorplan, public spaces offer sightlines with clear visual paths that enhance airiness, promote easy interaction between spaces, and draw the eye to luxuriant, leafy exterior surroundings. Overlooking a prodigious camellia bed, the living room features an original focal-point fireplace, its chimney reinforced as part of a comprehensive seismic upgrade. Formal dining room and kitchen enjoy outlooks to the side garden, where bulbs like bluebells and calla lilies mingle. The kitchen’s vintage allure melds with fresh updates; a restored Wedgewood range with double ovens intermixes with new-but-befitting elements: artisan cabinetry of FSC-certified mahogany (the exemplar for wood sourcing), backsplashes of hand-painted tile, and terra cotta floor tile.

The kitchen flows broadly to a low-maintenance Trex deck with grill station for dining amid a profusion of blooms. A foundational oak anchors the back of the property creating a sinuous, airy canopy. It soars above the gardenscape where stone strolling paths wind around beds of vibrant natives that burst into kaleidoscopic bloom seasonally. Flowering trees, like ceanothus, add to the display, and fruit-bearing trees and vines– avocado, lemon, elderberry, and grape– produce a harvest. A native garden, it depends on little water and creates a habitat for butterflies and birds.

Alongside the garden, the detached bungalow, originally a carriage house, was rebuilt to suit multiple purposes simultaneously. With a generous footprint and vaulted, skylighted roof, it feels spacious as a home office wired for ethernet, media room with aerial projector, and cabinetry-equipped workshop. Electric double doors plus a Dutch door open the space extensively, endowing it for garden-party entertaining as well.

Three bedrooms contain closets with built-ins and are served by two full bathrooms; one spotlights sapphire-blue tile, the other green-gray Fireclay tile.

Recent infrastructure upgrades include a new roof and copper plumbing. Expansive basement and attic spaces offer abundant storage and opportunity to add living space.