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.

The roughly 1,900-square-foot house is set against a hillside in a sequence of split levels. Visitors enter at the intermediate level which contains the kitchen and dining area. From there, the floor plan rises to a living room and study, with two of the three bedrooms on the lower level.

Olsen's own house, a few doors down and now listed on the National Register of Historic Places, was built a few years after this one, making this stretch of San Diego Road an unlikely cluster of Bay Area modernism in a neighborhood otherwise dominated by 1920s and 30s Mediterraneans and Tudors.

Kip and his wife, Joan, owned the house from 1952 until 2013—marking the only sale in its history until the current owner, Susie Injijian, bought it that year for $1,025,000.

In the years since, she has focused on upkeep rather than reinvention: the main-floor bathroom was updated during a 2013 asbestos abatement, its old linoleum tile replaced with penny travertine, while a more extensive remodel of the lower-level bathroom began in 2021 and took five years to complete, a timeline stretched by the pandemic.

"Her philosophy from the beginning was always about preservation," says listing agent Anna Bellomo, founder of District Homes.

"She fell in love with the architecture when she bought the house, and rather than trying to reinvent it, she focused only on doing the necessary work—like electrical work, the roof, asbestos abatement. Even the bathroom renovation was handled so sensitively that people have walked through the house and asked us which bathroom was remodeled."

That restraint sets the house apart in a neighborhood not otherwise known for modernism.

"Thousand Oaks is incredibly eclectic architecturally, but there aren't that many midcentury homes," says Bellomo. "That makes this house unusual without making it feel out of place. It still feels very much like Thousand Oaks."

Bellomo says the listing has drawn interest from well beyond the zip code, with calls coming in from as far away as Los Angeles from buyers searching specifically for this caliber of preserved midcentury architecture—a condition which can be attributed to the fact that the home has only had two owners in 73 years. 

"The original owners knew Donald Olsen and wanted to preserve his design, and the current owner carried that same philosophy forward," she adds.

"Every additional ownership creates another opportunity for someone to enclose a room, add a bathroom or make a change without considering the original design as a whole. That simply hasn't happened here."