A hand-built house made of amber-colored plexiglass and shingles, perched above San Francisco Bay in Point Richmond, spent just 18 days on the market before entering pending status after drawing six competing offers. Lumiere House, listed at $899,000, was designed and built roughly 50 years ago by architect Walter Thomas Brooks and his family, and it had never previously hit the public market.
The 1,186-square-foot home at 331 Western Drive was built in the early 1970s by Brooks along with his wife, Jean, and their children, according to The Independent. Brooks acquired the 6,500-square-foot plot after a client passed on it, and professionals completed the rough construction before the Brooks family finished the finer details themselves. His daughter, Carrie Brooks, helped build the house as a teenager, working alongside her brother to attach the plexiglass shingles to the structure using scaffolding.
An Architecture Inspired by Light
Brooks developed the concept for Lumiere House through years of experimenting with natural shapes and light, and he was inspired in part by plexiglass he encountered at a 1967 exhibit in Montreal, per the same report. He studied ancient structures, particularly those in Mexico, and in an interview published by SFGATE, Brooks described designing the home around an “Architecture of Light,” drawing on crystalline structures, teepee forms, Mayan temples, and shipbuilding. That vision produced a prow-shaped front, a crow’s nest, and a drop-down platform bed.
The house also carries the imprint of a plan Brooks never got to build: a spiral museum that never came to fruition. He went on to work on a line of California petal houses, part of a career the Eichler Network says was defined by a nature-inspired architectural style. Brooks, born in Illinois, founded his own architecture firm in 1965 after training under some of the era’s most influential modern architects.
Trained Under Bay Region Masters
Before striking out on his own, Brooks completed apprenticeships during the 1950s and 1960s under Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Mario Corbett, Wurster, Bernardi & Emmons, and John Hans Ostwald, according to records held by the UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design. Even earlier, at just 23 years old in 1950 while working for Anshen & Allen, Brooks designed the circular site plan for developer Joseph Eichler’s Fairmeadow subdivision in Palo Alto, a project that landed on the cover of Fortune magazine in 1955, according to the Eichler Network. Brooks met Jean while both were studying at UC Berkeley, and the couple lived in Lumiere House together for more than 50 years, raising four children there…