"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."
That distinction, house versus grounds, is the whole story right now at Blake Garden. 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.
If you walk the garden on a weekday, though, you already know something the headlines don't quite capture. The house stopped being part of the experience a long time ago.
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. "It's definitely a safety hazard to have a house that's structurally failing in the garden," he said. That framing matters for anyone trying to understand this as a neighborhood story rather than a preservation fight: the university isn't proposing to close anything the public currently uses. It's proposing to remove a building the public hasn't been able to enter in almost two decades.
The part residents already stopped noticing
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.
None of that has ever been part of what draws people to Blake Garden. The garden's identity, the thing that shows up in stroller trips and dog walks and the occasional small wedding, has always been the grounds themselves: the redwood canyon along Cerrito Creek, the Mediterranean-style terraces on the western slope, the koi pond, the lawsonite rock outcropping with its view across the Bay to the Golden Gate. The house has been closed to the public for the last eighteen years, while the grounds have stayed open on weekdays.
That gap between the building's legal significance and its actual role in daily use is worth sitting with, because it reframes what's actually at stake in this decision. Losing a working piece of the neighborhood would be one kind of change. Losing a building that has been closed to the public since 2008 is a different one.
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, sees the history differently and has described it as "demolition by neglect," speaking for herself and not for the association. McNiven attended a wedding at Blake House in the 1970s and remembers 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. "If you let something like that run down, of course it's going to be unattractive," she said. 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, which are what most visitors actually come for, stay open and get larger, not smaller. 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.
That's not nothing. A 1924 Walter Bliss-designed mansion with this kind of history, the Blake family's original landscape vision, five decades as the president's residence, is a genuine loss for anyone who cares about the East Bay's architectural record. But it's a different category of loss than closing a park or fencing off a trail. The garden that residents actually use each week is the part of this story that isn't going anywhere.
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, and the university's own construction history in downtown Berkeley, including the demolition of a century-old rent-controlled apartment building and a landmarked 1930s gas station to make way for a transfer-student dorm that opened in 2024, shows these decisions don't move quickly or quietly.
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.
