As SFGate reported, "It's a wonderful place," Annabelle Conlin said, sketching near the back of the mansion with her friend Jan Zaitlin, watching hummingbirds move through the native plants that spill down the hillside. "The ponds with the fish, they're very cool. We're more into the grounds."
The distinction between the house and the grounds is central to the current discussion about Blake Garden. According to Berkeleyside, UC Berkeley has proposed demolishing Blake House, the century-old mansion that sits at the center of the 10.6-acre estate in the Kensington hills. The university says the roughly 13,000-square-foot building is seismically unsafe and would cost about $15 million to renovate. An environmental impact report is being prepared before the plan goes to the UC Board of Regents for a final decision.
The house has been closed to the public since 2008, while the garden remains open.
What UC actually proposed
The plan, as described by university spokesperson Kyle Gibson, is specific. Demolish the house. Keep the reflecting pool that sits in front of it. Retain the building's foundation as an outdoor teaching area for the College of Environmental Design, which already runs Blake Garden as a landscape architecture lab. Expand the garden into the space the house currently occupies. Gibson has said more of the facade could be preserved depending on what the environmental review finds, but the direction is clear: the house comes down, the garden grows into where it stood.
The reasoning is structural, not aesthetic. Blake House sits in an earthquake fault zone, and Gibson has said seismic activity has already cracked its foundation. Berkeleyside quoted Gibson saying, "It's definitely a safety hazard to have a house that's structurally failing in the garden." The proposal would not close a space the public currently uses: the house has been closed to visitors for nearly two decades.
The house's place in the garden today
Blake House was the official residence of the University of California's president from 1967 until 2008, when then-president Robert Dynes moved out and called it unlivable. Since then it has sat empty. Plywood covers the ground-floor doors and windows. Paint peels off the columns. The interior, on the rare occasions anyone has looked in, shows empty bookshelves and buckets set out to catch rainwater from a leaking roof.
Visitors can enjoy the grounds' redwood canyon along Cerrito Creek, Mediterranean-style terraces on the western slope, koi pond, and lawsonite rock outcropping with its view across the Bay to the Golden Gate.
The house's historic significance and its present-day role in the garden are different considerations: the grounds remain open to visitors, even though the house has been closed to the public since 2008.
What the cost estimates show
Here's where the numbers get interesting. Back in 2013, a UC official estimated Blake House needed at least $3.5 million in repairs. Thirteen years later, the current estimate has more than quadrupled to roughly $15 million.
The university says the house is in extremely poor condition and that seismic activity has cracked its foundation. Local preservationist Carolyn McNiven, a board member of the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association, told Berkeleyside that the situation was "demolition by neglect." She was speaking for herself, not the association. Berkeleyside reported that McNiven attended a wedding at Blake House in the 1970s and remembered it as "gracious," ringed by a rose garden and a field of irises that Anita Blake and her sister Mabel Symmes planted as part of the original 1920s landscape design. Berkeleyside quoted McNiven saying, "If you let something like that run down, of course it's going to be unattractive." McNiven's view is that a different approach could have saved the building. The university's view is that the house is too damaged and too costly to repair. Both positions are on the record as the environmental review begins.
The gap between the 2013 and 2026 estimates shows how much the projected repair bill has changed over thirteen years of vacancy.
What actually disappears and what doesn't
If the demolition goes forward, the reflecting pool stays. The gardens stay open and would expand into the space the house occupies. The foundation becomes an outdoor teaching space rather than vanishing outright. What goes away is a building that the public hasn't been able to enter since 2008 and that, by UC's own account, poses a structural risk in an active fault zone.
Blake House is a 1924 Walter Bliss-designed mansion associated with the Blake family's original landscape vision, and it served as the University of California's president's official residence from 1967 until 2008.
The process still has to play out
Nothing is finalized. UC still has to complete the environmental impact report, a step required because the house likely qualifies as a historical resource under the California Environmental Quality Act. Only after that review is the proposal set to go before the UC Regents for approval. That's a public process with room for comment.
If you have a stake in how this site looks in five years, that timeline is your window.
The garden's rules haven't changed
Whatever happens to the house, the garden operates the same way it has for years, and that's worth knowing regardless of how the demolition question resolves. Blake Garden is open Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and closed on weekends with one annual exception for Cal Day in April. Parking is free in the lot at 70 Rincon Road. There's no entrance fee and no reservation system, and the College of Environmental Design is explicit that all areas are shared space, meaning no group can book out a section for a private event. Well-behaved dogs are welcome on leash. Picnic tables are first come, first served. A free public tour runs the second Thursday of every month.
The garden also holds a few details that don't show up in any planning document but shape how people actually use it: a blackberry tunnel kids duck through, a large chess board built by a former high school intern out of redwood and cedar, and a "forest bathing" nook built into a planted bathtub. None of that changes based on what happens to the mansion at the center of the property.
The debate over Blake House centers on a building the public has not been able to enter since 2008. The reflecting pool stays. The trails stay. The Monday-through-Friday hours, the free lot on Rincon Road and the leashed-dog policy are not part of what's being decided.
If you're weighing what a hillside home near a landmark like this is actually worth, or how a piece of neighborhood history factors into long-term value, Anastasia Levitansky can walk you through what's happening on the ground in Kensington and what it means for your specific address.
This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.
