Elegant Digs for the Preservationist Brothers of Sigma Phi.

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Author: Wills, Eric

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY

Dateline: Berkeley, Calif.

An Arts and Crafts masterpiece nestled at the foot of the Berkeley Hills, the Thorsen House is an enigma. Today it might be advertised as an "ultimate bungalow," but the house is â€" at 9,200 square feet â€" more like a mansion. With its unusual woodwork and cascades of brick stairs, it little resembles the quaint cottages that dot the windy roads above it.

"I had never seen anything quite like it architecturally," says Edward R. Bosley, who was a freshman at the University of California at Berkeley in 1972 when he first glimpsed the house. "It had a Japanese-inspired feel to it, a certain kind of Asian elegance."

Just as intriguing is the question asked by countless passers-by: Who lives there? A retired dean? Monks? In fact, a small sign on the front door that says "Sigma Phi" reveals the answer. The Thorsen House, completed in 1910 and now listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is a fraternity house.

"The assumption a lot of people default to right away is Animal House," says Mr. Bosley, who joined the Sigma Phi Society and lived in the house for nearly five years. That sparked his interest in the house's architects, the brothers Charles and Henry Greene â€" the best-known architects of the Arts and Crafts movement in America. Today Mr. Bosley is the director of the Gamble House, in Pasadena. Now a museum run by the University of Southern California, it is the most famous of the Greene & Greene homes.

The Sigma Phi brothers are good preservationists, Mr. Bosley says. "The fraternity has a certain level of awareness about the importance of the house and no money to muck it up, or inclination to alter it. It's really in pretty original condition."

Perched over Piedmont Avenue along the university's fraternity row, south of the campus, the house bears the name of its first owner, William Randolph Thorsen, a lumber baron from Michigan. After buying a corner plot in Berkeley, he chose the Greene brothers as his architects. They had previously designed his sister-in-law's house in Pasadena.

The Greenes fashioned an L-shaped house for Thorsen and his wife, with the shorter arm of the L facing the street and concealing a garden behind it. In front is a sweeping entryway built with charred, misshapen bricks known as clinkers. Exaggerated roof overhangs and Gothic-fantasy chimneys loom above the house's redwood-shingle facade.

Inside the Greenes relied on unpainted but carefully finished mahogany and teak, and on superior craftsmanship. "Making useful things beautiful â€" if they had a philosophy, that was it," says Mr. Bosley.

Sigma Phi purchased the house soon after the Thorsens passed away in 1942 and has maintained its beauty through a Saturday ritual: the cleanup. That's why a junior pledge named Drew Lewis is walking through the house at 8:30 a.m. on Saturday, ringing a cowbell to wake the 13 brothers.

"There is an art to ringing the bell," says Michael W. Gee, a third-year psychology major who is the house manager. Some "bros," as he calls them, stir after a few gentle rings. Others, depending on how lively Friday night was, require vigorous clanging. Breakfast consists of French toast and sausage.

Then Mr. Gee lays out the day's project: Clean up from the previous weekend's alumni party. Brothers pick bottles and other garbage off the basketball court in the garden, straighten up the service area that contains trash cans and recycling bins, touch up the inside wood with Murphy's Oil Soap, and mop the floors.

"Mop the floor â€" that was my mom's domain," says Sean D. Kennedy, a fourth-year history major who remembers being put off by the cleaning ritual when he was a pledge. That attitude changes quickly, says Mr. Gee. Because of the work schedule, "the bros really get to know the house," he says. "They build a relationship with it."

Pledges especially bear the brunt of cleaning, which is Sigma Phi's tame, gentlemanly version of hazing. Push-ups and head shaving are out, Mr. Gee says, and kitchen cleaning is in. As Mr. Lewis mops the floor in the entry hall, he says the work is no big deal. He visited other fraternities when he was deciding where to pledge, but in the other houses, "you half expected to pick up a rug and find the chalk outline of a person underneath," he says. "They were a mess."

Perry E. Fetterman, a fourth-year political-science major who is Sigma Phi's president, delights in showing off the house's features to visitors. He starts in the living room, where beams at the top of the wall frame a frieze of rose vines hand-painted on Belgian linen. More beams frame sections of leaded art glass in the ceiling. The red and yellow panes, crafted in an organic design that complements the vines on the wall, cast an ethereal light throughout the room. The beams are mahogany, with teak pegs.

But in the entry hall, it's the other way around, says Mr. Fetterman: The beams are teak, and the pegs mahogany. "There are no visible screws" anywhere in the house, he says with admiration.

Tucked in the corner of the entry hall is an oil painting of ships in a harbor. Mr. Fetterman says the Thorsens "were very enthusiastic about sailing." Which explains, he says, why the dining room resembles a sailing ship's windowed stern, protruding from the front of the house over Piedmont Avenue.

At the far end of the dining room, he opens and closes a handcrafted china cabinet built into the wall. The resulting "thwifft" is a sign that the seal is still airtight, he says. "The house has kept its integrity."

Just as you begin to forget that Mr. Fetterman is a fraternity brother in a Cal baseball cap, rather than a house-museum docent, he leads the way down to the basement. Pool and foosball tables, a projection television, ratty sofas, and even a wooden sauna that the brothers built in the 80s â€" all are scattered amid the posts that hold up the house.

Mr. Fetterman's presidential perk is on the second floor: the master suite that belonged to Mr. Thorsen. (Mrs. Thorsen had her own suite next door, a common practice in the early 20th century.) Mr. Thorsen's room opens up to a deck that gave him an unobstructed view of the San Francisco Bay, but today the view is mostly obscured by a building with a "For Rent" sign splashed across its front. Still, the deck is a great place to watch sunsets with his girlfriend, says Mr. Fetterman.

The Sigma Phi brothers renovated the deck a few years ago, one of their many house projects. In 1978 they helped restore a second-floor balcony to its original design, removing the walls and ceiling that were added shortly after the fraternity moved in. In the early 1990s, the brothers built 12 dining-room chairs, replicas of the originals designed by the Greenes. (The architects designed nearly 40 pieces of furniture for the house, most of which are now on display in the Huntington Library Art Collections, in San Marino.)

Sigma Phi is now working on its largest project yet: raising funds to make improvements to protect the house, and its inhabitants, from earthquakes. The Hayward fault runs just 500 feet from the house, and a major earthquake is expected there in the next 30 years, says Thomas Saxby, a Bay Area architect who is writing a report for the fraternity with renovation recommendations.

Mr. Saxby, a member of Sigma Phi as an undergraduate, lived in the house in the late 70s. He fears that a quake would topple the chimneys and the living room's southern wall, made almost entirely of glass. "The list goes on and on," says Mr. Saxby. "We feel strongly that we need to strengthen the house, not only to prevent portions of it from falling, but to prevent major damage."

Renovations need not mar the Greenes' design, he adds. For instance, holes can be drilled down through the chimneys, and steel rods can be inserted to hold them together. And the chimneys' heavy plaster caps can be replaced with much lighter hollow replicas. But such upgrades can be costly.

Sigma Phi has so far raised about $2-million, says Mr. Fetterman, one-fifth of its $10-million goal. The fraternity granted the California Preservation Foundation a historic easement, which gives the nonprofit organization watchdog oversight of the renovations. The easement enabled all donations to the fraternity to be tax-deductible â€" a point that appeals to corporate donors.

Many alumni have already made contributions; most have a strong attachment to the house. Take David Elias. He joins the brothers as they gather at the dining-room table for a post-cleanup lunch, only he keeps one hand beneath the table to rock a cradle â€" it holds his nine-week-old son.

Mr. Elias, who joined Sigma Phi and lived in the house as an undergraduate in the early 1990s, is now an alumni adviser to the brothers. Between bites of beef, rice, and spicy cabbage, he says that alumni visit the house regularly.

"Yeah, some never leave," Mr. Kennedy interjects. As the brothers laugh, Mr. Elias, who lives nearby, admits that he visits more often than most.

Would the Greene brothers like the idea that the house is now home to a fraternity? Mr. Elias says that the architects designed the house to be lived in, to complement the energy and creativity of its inhabitants. Better that the brothers live there, he says, than that the house become a museum. Besides, he says, how else would so many undergraduates have come to know a Greene & Greene house so intimately?

"I'll never again live in a place this beautiful," he says. "I've long ago given up hope of that."

Sigma Phi is now working on its largest project yet: raising funds to make improvements to protect the house, and its inhabitants, from earthquakes.

PHOTO (COLOR): Home to a U. of California at Berkeley fraternity since the 1940s, the Thorsen House was designed by Charles and Henry Greene, brothers who were known for sweeping facades as well as details like light fixtures.

PHOTO (COLOR): The living room at the Thorsen House has mahogany beams with teak pegs, and leaded art glass in the ceiling. In the entry hall (right), as in the rest of the house, no screws or nails are visible.

PHOTO (COLOR)

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By Eric Wills