Olsen-Designed Midcentury Modern home Built For Physics Pioneer Is Selling for Only the Second Time in 73 Years

Tucked into the slope of Berkeley's Thousand Oaks neighborhood, sits a house that has changed hands only once in more than 70 years. Now, 775 San Diego Road, known to architecture enthusiasts as the Kip House, is for sale again and listed at $1,425,000.Donald Olsen designed the house in 1952 for Arthur Frederic Kip, a UC Berkeley physics professor whose pioneering semiconductor research helped lay the scientific groundwork for the computers and electronics that would define the following decades. The commission came early in Olsen's career, before he became one of Northern California's most influential modernist architects. Olsen had studied under Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus movement's founder, at Harvard, and the Kip House reflects that training with its clean geometry and walls of glass.Loading...Inside the split-level home, which has only changed hands twice in 70 years. Open Homes PhotographyLoading...A living room and balcony hidden away in the trees.Open Homes PhotographyLoading...Much of the home has been preserved in its original design.Open Homes PhotographyThe roughly 1,900-square-foot house is set against a hillside in a sequence of split levels. Visitors enter at the in...