Tucked deep in the meandering Thousand Oaks neighborhood is a hidden estate anchored by ancient rhyolite boulders.

He was smitten even before crossing the threshold. L. John Harris had admired the park-like setting of his Berkeley home during frequent visits to the neighborhood before purchasing it in 2001. What he did not realize was that he would devote the better part of five years to reshaping it, leaving his mark on the rocky Thousand Oaks property as others had before him.

Peering over the fence at his house on the 1800 block of Yosemite Road, one notices that the earth pitches away from the sidewalk down to a rock ledge 40 feet below. Lodged into the hillside, wedged among boulders, the turn-of-the-century brown-shingle house is anchored to a much older rock foundation.

“This is a house that everyone stops at,” says Harris. “I did it for years.” Fifty-nine-year-old Harris’s charm is that he is a good storyteller with a deep, mellifluous voice. He is also quick to recognize a real estate investment opportunity when he sees one. Upon learning that a friend of a friend was selling the house he’d coveted for so long, he jumped at the chance to buy it. Like any old home, the house and half-acre grounds needed a good deal of work.

Most people passing through Thousand Oaks see a beautifully landscaped setting conveniently located within walking distance from Solano Avenue. It is a desirable place to live, with Bay views and a density somewhere between suburb and city.

Typically, larger homes are shoehorned into narrow lots so that next-door neighbors can practically hold hands through their open windows. That was not always the case. Initially there were large, exclusive properties that developers or owners subsequently subdivided. Today, the open space is mostly small private yards, the occasional pocket park, and footpaths perpendicular to the roads. These paths step up and down the hills like shoots and ladders. Harris’s is one of the rare lots with breathing room and a seemingly endless front yard.

None of his estate—neither house, rocks, nor trees—is easy to see when driving by in a car or even while walking along the sidewalk. Harris’s house stretches across the middle of a downward sloping yard strewn with large live oaks and giant volcanic rocks, trademark features of the Thousand Oaks neighborhood. Many other nearby properties contain individual rock perches for enjoying picnics and panoramic views, but boulders surround Harris’s house on three sides, creating a protected, private court and a sense of enclosure.

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An abundance of rocks serve as landscaping and natural climbing structures at the nearby Great Stone Face Park. Watching fireworks from atop Indian Rock is a Fourth of July neighborhood tradition. The rocks at John Hinkel Park add to the ambience which makes it the perfect setting for the live theater performed there each summer. The park-like landscape around Harris’s home is similar to each of these pocket parks that were set aside for the public at the turn of the century by developer John Hopkins Spring, conservationist Duncan McDuffie, and his partner Joseph Mason.

The original owner of John Harris’s home, Mark Daniels, was Spring’s landscape architect and civil engineer for the Thousand Oaks development. Later Daniels would work on Sir Francis Wood in San Francisco with developers Mason-McDuffie and landscape architects the Olmstead Brothers, and among other well-known men of his day. He was just starting out his career when he built the house.

“Daniels had his pick of properties and selected a choice lot,” says Trish Hawthorne, who lives up the street in a home designed by Julia Morgan. Hawthorne calls the Daniels house “beautifully sited.

“ He could have put it right up at the street,” she says.

Daniels and architect of record A.W. Smith of Oakland considered the boulders in locating the house when they began work on it in approximately 1910. “The whole trick of fitting in with the rocks was well done,” says Dave Weinstein, author of Signature Architects of the San Francisco Bay Area (Gibbs Smith Publisher, 2006). Yet rocks were blasted out with dynamite to make room for homes on the Mark Daniels property as well as elsewhere in the neighborhood. Each time Harris digs in his yard he says he finds “a new trove of stones,” the remnants of the blasting.

The rock, rare Northbrae Rhyolite, is considered young in geological time, at roughly 11.5 million years old. The Hayward and Calaveras faults transported it from the Quien Sabe (literally, “Who Knows” in Spanish) volcanic field south of San Jose near Hollister according to geologist Dr. Steve Edwards, Director of Tilden Park Botanical Gardens. “Rhyolite is chemically the same as granite. It all comes from the same melt,” says Edwards. Unlike granite, the rhyolite lava erupts on the earth’s surface. Its crystals are small because they cool quickly. The minerals in the rock make it light colored—usually yellow, orange, or tawny.

The rock predates the earliest Thousand Oaks inhabitants by 3.5 to 5.7 million years. The first shellmounds in the area, evidence of American Indian settlement, date back 5.8 million years although archaeologists have identified isolated artifacts that appear to be 8 million years old. In the 1950s, kids could find arrowheads in the narrow slot of cave underneath Shasta Rock on Harris’s property. Earlier, in the 1880s, children are said to have found old Spanish coins there. Legend has it that the infamous bandit Joaquin Murietta used to hide out in the vicinity.

The boulders, it seems, hold secrets of the area’s history. They may also house an ephemeral or invisible past. Weinstein has interviewed locals for the forthcoming book Berkeley Rocks (Ten Speed Press, 2006), a photography book by Jonathan Chester with text by Weinstein, about the Thousand Oaks neighborhood. He says residents feel that the rocks are spiritually charged and that they foster a sense of security and permanence, however illusory it may be. The rocks have been here before any of us, and will remain long after we are all gone, they told Weinstein.

Perhaps Daniels, who nestled his home in with the site’s boulders, sensed their power as he appreciated their beauty. He carefully navigated the rock outcroppings in laying out the neighborhood’s streets, as he had in San Francisco’s Forest Hill residential park. Spring and Daniels followed the land’s natural contours by gently winding roads up the steep hillside. “They wove the streets with the terrain,” says Richard Schwartz, a local contractor and author of Berkeley 1900 and Earthquake Exodus, who has been studying the early history of Thousand Oaks for decades. “It is a unique place.”

It is thought that Indian Trail, near the lot where Daniels built his home, was worn into the hillside by the feet of the area’s first residents. It is certainly consistent with Daniel’s professed philosophy, whether he had appropriated an existing path or merely made it appear as if the trail had been there all along.

“The art of the landscape architect consists more in knowing what not to do than what to do,” wrote Daniels in 1915. “In other words, he must seek to retain the natural effects of the setting and, where changes are essential to utility, to disguise man’s handiwork as much as possible. It is merely obedience to the familiar rule—‘true art is to conceal art.’

Ironically, most of the existing trees in San Francisco’s Sutro Forest were chopped down to make room for nearby Forest Hill’s homes in 1912–13. He must have created the artful, broad and formal Pacheco Stairs in that neighborhood to have a commanding ocean view. Large urns mark both Pacheco Stairs and Indian Trail in Thousand Oaks. An urn on The Alameda is the only clue to the location of Indian Trail path. It is a wooded and hidden shortcut to Yosemite Road sheltered by live oak and favored by deer. The passage, with its stone steps and fragments of rhyolite retaining walls, is shady and mysterious, like Harris’s backyard.

Daniels also designed the famous 17 Mile Drive in Pebble Beach, and Los Angeles’s movie-star mansion community, Bel-Air. His other accomplishments were varied. He left Berkeley soon after he built his home to become the superintendent of Yosemite National Park. Later he worked as an architect, designing buildings as well as neighborhoods in Southern California. In addition to his accomplished professional career, he was also a musician and a painter.

Woodsy luxury: Landscape architect Mark Daniels, who designed the layout of Thousand Oaks and San Francisco’s Forest Hill neighborhoods, worked on the design of this Yosemite Road home for himself, carefully locating it among the boulders on the lot. Photo by Aengus Mcgiffin.

Harris identifies with Daniels on many levels. He has tried out various careers, after art school working at the Cheeseboard and very briefly at Chez Panisse. He’s been a cartoonist, publisher, filmmaker, and now decorator. Harris considers himself a jack-of-all-trades like Daniels.

According to Weinstein, Daniels frequently wrote trade articles for a journal called The Architect and Engineer. Also a writer, Harris is best known for his Book of Garlic, a humorous treatise on the history and uses of the spice. In the 1990s he took up filmmaking and produced the documentary Divine Food: 100 Years in the Kosher Delicatessen Trade. Recently he’s been writing food articles for local publications. As a young man Harris rejected working in his family’s Los Angeles textile business, but has found the project of his own house surprisingly satisfying. In conjunction with his architect Rachel Hamilton he designed his own interiors, a five-year process that’s still in progress.

“I feel like I have been channeling Mark Daniels while working on the house,” says Harris, who dresses casually in sandals and shorts, and wears his dark curly hair long. Whenever there was a decision to be made, he would imagine what Daniels would have said. “I’m double-checking on an intuitive level about what he would like or not.” The house, says Harris, “was another one of my little careers. I really spent just about every minute of my life on it.”

The most notable interior change that Harris has made is expanding the kitchen by 700 square feet—about the size of a one-bedroom efficiency apartment. The mahogany wet bar/wine storage and window seat are new, as is everything else in the tasteful gourmet showcase. Harris entertains occasionally, but the ex-cookbook publisher says he cooks more when he is dating someone.

Harris and Weinstein both note that the inside and the outside comprise two distinct houses. Weinstein identifies the outside as “woodsy chalet.” Compared to the luxurious interior, the rather rustic exterior would fit in at Yosemite or any other national park. Extra-long shingles and bulky triangular braces at the eaves are its most salient features.

Now roughly 4,500 square feet, the house was once a modest two bedroom, one bath. With several owners making countless changes, it is sometimes hard to pinpoint what is original. Much of the eclectic, rambling upstairs and all of the lower level were filled in with rooms and finished over time.

The Frank W. Wentworth family owned the house for about 70 years and made several refinements, including a marble-clad fireplace and a tiny library addition by architect Walter Ratcliff, whose well-known family-owned firm still exists today. Harris recently restored the library, which cantilevers off the back of the house. He oiled the closely spaced, carved redwood beams to reveal the original hand-painted gold, red, and green decorative stencil design repeated on the end of each beam. Harris hopes to one day restore the ceiling between the beams to canvas. A wall of windows overlooks the backyard on one side, a wall of books on the other. The intimate scale of the room makes it cozy and inviting.

Harris’s modifications—an expanded eat-in gourmet kitchen, level backyard terraces, an outdoor barbecue, and a master bedroom sitting room, to name a few—would appeal to a family that enjoys entertaining. He says he renovated with a family’s needs in mind, although he lives alone with his collections of art and antique musical instruments.

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Most of Berkeley at the turn of the 19th century was formerly grassland, says Richard Schwartz. At the edge of the area’s many creeks grew bunchgrass and incredible fields of wildflowers. But Thousand Oaks was different. It had shade, water, live oak trees, and of course the unusual rocks.

Features that had attracted daytrippers to the remote, rocky wilderness above town no doubt led Native Americans to settle there many years earlier. They lived lightly, but we can’t say they left no trace of themselves. Although it is hardly obvious, the manicured, park-like quality of Thousand Oaks is their legacy.

Stewards of the land, the Native Americans burned the landscape to keep brush back, cultivate certain plants, and maintain a balanced ecosystem that would attract game. In this way they nurtured the grasses from which they ate the seed, and the oaks from which they gathered acorns.

Visitors to the unincorporated outpost came by foot—horses were too expensive, says Schwartz—from Berkeley to picnic among the rocks. According to Weinstein, the remote area became a playground.

Schwartz says that even in those early days there was discussion about setting the sacred land aside. In 1908 a measure came on the ballot that would have slated what is now Thousand Oaks—just below The Arlington, a few blocks north of Solano, north to Cerrito Creek, and west to Santa Fe—as park land. It lost by only 194 votes.

Developer Spring, who had already purchased the tract, had the all clear to develop it as an exclusive residential neighborhood. Following the example of the adjacent Northbrae neighborhood, Spring incorporated Great Stone Face Park and public footpaths into his tract. By 1910, the Solano Avenue tunnel brought public transit to Thousand Oaks. “Once the train got a foothold, selling the lots went well,” says Schwartz.

And so the land formerly identified as “The Old Indian Burial Grounds” became an accessible upscale neighborhood. Apart from boulders and trees, it is hard to say how much of the landscape Mark Daniels finessed, or even how much was already groomed by Native Americans.

Daniels’s property, though touched by numerous owners, retains an authenticity that may be hard to erase, so long as big rocks remain intact and live oaks shade the yard. When Harris is through with his house remodel, he hopes the end product will be an equally artful, seamless whole.

So far his changes have connected the house with its outdoor environment, making the backyard accessible from the kitchen for the first time. Harris also cleared much of the brush to make the rocks more visible from indoors. Now the eye moves between near views of the boulders on the property and distant water and city views.

He plans to create a pond in the front yard and widen the tight and somewhat precarious paths. The yard’s contemporary trappings—lawn furniture, bocce ball court, fenced garden—barely detract from the powerful oaks and the stone terraces made with rock rubble found on site.

“ I feel humbled by the rocks,” Harris says. “There is a comfort, at the same time an awe.” In afternoon when the light shifts under the live oaks, or at dusk when the colors in the rock come alive, the magical, transcendent quality of the land emerges.

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Lauri Puchall writes about architecture and the environment. In addition to her regular column in The Monthly, she writes for ArchitectureWeek.