141 Fairlawn Dr
Berkeley, CA
The Photographer's House
An early work by Andrew Batey, built in 1973 for a man who photographed architecture for a living.
Some houses are built to be lived in. A few are built to be looked through. 141 Fairlawn is one of the rare ones that manages both — a house of glass set into the North Berkeley hills, designed so completely around light and landscape that, more than half a century later, it still feels as though it was finished last year. Its story begins with two young men at the start of their careers: an architect who would go on to national recognition, and a photographer who spent his life teaching the rest of us how to see buildings.
The Architect. Andrew Batey (1944–1994) would become one of the more admired architects of his generation. With his partner Mark Mack, he formed Batey & Mack in 1978, and within a few years the firm was named one of a select few invited to submit designs for the Getty Center in Los Angeles, chosen alongside the most celebrated names in the field. But all of that came later. Before the Napa houses, before the partnership, before the Getty, Batey was a young architect fresh from an education that spanned Cambridge, a period in the London office of Norman Foster, and a year in Mexico studying the light-and-wall architecture of Luis Barragán. It was in these early years, in 1972, that he took on a commission for a house in the Berkeley hills — one of his earliest known works.
Batey would later describe his own work in words that fit this house as naturally as any he built: "Houses I design have a respectful and balanced relationship to the landscape, a solidarity of materials, and always purity, simplicity and austerity of form." At 141 Fairlawn, written years before he said it, the philosophy is already whole.
The Client. Henry Bowles, who commissioned it, was an architectural photographer — trained under Morley Baer, among the most respected architectural photographers on the West Coast, and later shooting for Condé Nast. When he set out to build his own home, he hired a young architect who shared his sensibility, and together they made a photographer's idea of how to live: everything oriented to the light, the trees pulled indoors, nothing between you and the view.
The Darkroom. Down at street level, beside the single-car garage, sits a separate studio of roughly 300 square feet with its own sink and full bath. Today it reads as a flexible studio, but it was built as Bowles's darkroom — approved by the City in 1972 on the condition it be excavated into the hillside to reduce its prominence. A working photographer's studio, half-buried in the slope, where images developed in red light while the city glittered below. A later owner added a skylight — daylight let deliberately into the one room first designed to keep it out. The darkroom, opened to the sun.
The House Today. Step inside and the house does the thing Batey built it to do — it brings the outside in. A two-story wall of glass pulls the canopy straight into the double-height living space, an open-tread stair climbing toward the mezzanine. Sliding doors carry the space outward — one onto the entry walk at the front, a step from the deck among the oaks; a second, a floor up toward the rear, opening on the same wall and looking down over the open sitting area by the entrance. The updated kitchen carries quartz counters and custom tile into a light-filled main floor. On the main level, a private bedroom opens directly to a full bath — a primary suite, with a second door as its own private entrance — and a flexible den sits tucked into the far corner. Upstairs, a 400+ square foot master suite where the bedroom opens to the black-tile bath Batey returned in the late 1980s to design, lit from two skylights. The house is redwood, with central heat, EV charging, a Trex deck, and a roughly 220-square-foot detached garage.
The Next Chapter. For more than fifty years the house has kept its clarity — simplicity, open living, an unbroken connection to the landscape, a quiet intelligence in every room. One writer said of Batey's houses that, "with their faultless sense of restraint and proportion, these houses are in it for the long haul." This one has already proven it. Now it waits for the next person to see what Batey and Bowles saw, and to carry it forward.