In California, a John Marsh Davis-Designed Home Comes Up for Sale for the Very First Time

Nestled in a thickly wooded site in Kentfield, Calif., about 12 miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge, the house commissioned by Donald and Nancy Barbour 60 years ago pairs the solidity of a barn with the intricacy of a pagoda. A giant wooden rectangle, its entry facade is made mainly of two giant glass doors. Some 16 feet high, the doors slide open so completely that inside and outside unite, with the living/dining room becoming a kind of covered porch. A vast skylight over the interior space further blurs the line between indoors and out. Bedrooms occupy a kind of mezzanine that seems to float, as does the extra-wide roof. There are supports, but a magician hid some of them in floor-to-ceiling bookcases and threaded others through wisteria-laden trellises. In that way, anything heavy either disappears or dissolves into filigree ornament.

The magician was the Oklahoma-born architect John Marsh Davis (1931-2009), who built some of the most original Bay Area houses (and a handful of Napa Valley vineyards) in the second half of the 20th century. Though labeled Midcentury Modern, his houses are nothing like the better known Midcentury Modern works of architects like Richard Neutra, which are composed of flat, white surfaces. And, though labeled organic, they are nothing like the better-known organic works of Frank Lloyd Wright, which tend to hug the ground. Mr. Davis’s houses aren’t flat, or white, or low. They soar, in a style that Hans Baldauf, the author of a new book about Mr. Davis, calls “wood expressionism.” Mr. Davis himself liked to call his approach Forgotten Modern.

Now Mr. Davis’s Forgotten Modern is being remembered. Mr. Baldauf, himself a successful Bay Area architect, discovered Mr. Davis when he was hired to design a visitor centre for the Joseph Phelps winery in Napa. He was enamoured of the vineyard’s main building, a dramatic barn-like structure split by a great trellis. To make his addition successful, he says, he wanted to know more about that building. Its designer, John Marsh Davis (a name he had never heard before), turned out to be “the visionary behind a whole series of buildings that I had long admired,” he says. Given access to Mr. Davis’s archive by his niece, Katy Davis Song, Mr. Baldauf learned enough to finish the winery project, then spent more than a decade compiling a book about the early years of Mr. Davis’s career.

“The more I dug into John’s work, the more I came to believe that it deserved to be more widely known,” he says.

One of the first buildings Mr. Baldauf visited was the Barbour house, which, he says, “bowled me over. Having designed a large sliding door on an early project, I knew the complexities involved, and here was one four times as large and almost twice as high that allowed interior and exterior to merge completely.” The residence, he adds, “is one of John’s masterpieces and established themes that he would go on to explore throughout his career.”

Mr. Baldauf couldn’t have known when his book, “Design Legacy of John Marsh Davis: Early Years,” was published in March that the house on its cover would soon come up for sale. In the wake of Donald and Nancy’s deaths, both in 2022, their three children are listing the five-bedroom, three-bath, 4,000-square-foot house on 0.75-acre for $4.995 million. (The sale includes an adjoining 0.43-acre lot.)

“The grand scale of the rooms and the views of Mount Tam will draw many potential buyers,” says listing agent Bitsa Freeman of Boulevard Marin, “Whether they can pay the price remains to be seen.” In 2023, the median sale price in Kentfield was around $4.2 million, Ms. Freeman says. “We have priced [the house] definitely on the higher end because of its esteemed architectural history.”

No one who knew John Marsh Davis as a child could have predicted his career path. Growing up, Mr. Davis later told David Sheff, a journalist who is married to the Barbours’ daughter Karen, he didn’t know what an architect was. And nothing about his birthplace, in Oklahoma’s western prairie, taught him about expressive architecture or dramatic topography.

But two things happened that had profound effects on Mr. Davis’s direction. First, when he got to the University of Oklahoma in 1951, the director of the school of architecture was Bruce Goff, a student of Frank Lloyd Wright who designed some very quirky houses, and encouraged his own students to be just as idiosyncratic. So successful was Mr. Goff as a teacher than an entire cadre of architects, who fanned out across the country in the postwar years, have together been dubbed “the American School” by scholars. Their archives (including Mr. Davis’s) are being gathered at their alma mater, now the Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture at the University of Oklahoma.

Second, as an officer in the U.S. Navy from 1955 to 1959, Mr. Davis was able to tour Japan extensively, according to his niece. Among the landmarks he visited was the five-story pagoda at Horyuji Temple in Nara, its vast overhangs cantilevered from a single cedar post, and its wooden joints loose enough to withstand earthquakes. After leaving the Navy, Mr. Davis spent a few years working in Oklahoma before moving to Sausalito, Calif., in 1961. There, he began building in a style that had roots in what he had seen in Japan. His first house, which he designed for himself, was an elegant wooden volume, shaped roughly like a Japanese temple, overlooking Richardson Bay.

In 1963, Donald Barbour, a young physician, and his wife, Nancy, were looking for an architect to design a house on a parcel of land they had bought in the hills above Kentfield. Ms. Barbour saw the house Mr. Davis had built for himself in Sausalito on the cover of “California Home” Magazine. She called him. Soon, says their son Steve Barbour, Mr. Davis was sketching the rough outline of the house, which included a wooden bridge over a garden as the only route to the front door.

To design that garden, Nancy called the renowned landscape architect Thomas Church, whose work included helping with the master plans for UC Berkeley and Stanford University. According to their son-in-law Mr. Sheff, “Mr. Church agreed to design the garden only because (he admitted that) he liked the sound of Nancy’s ‘husky’ voice on the phone; she had a cold at the time. He charged $100 and a bottle of vodka.” For that, Mr. Church planned a terrace garden with twisting Japanese maples in large wooden planters.

According to Nancy Barbour, Mr. Davis’s style went beyond architecture to encompass a way of looking at life. “John taught me how to see beauty in details,” she told Mr. Sheff. “As I grew up, I noticed every corner, the trim, the way the boards intersected…. John anticipated every sightline, the way the light would filter in at different times of year. Everything is lined up. Everywhere you look, there’s something dramatic and spectacular.”

As Mr. Sheff wrote in an essay in Mr. Baldauf’s book, Mr. Davis’s “relationship with the family didn’t end when the house was complete; he became a lifelong friend. He never stopped redesigning the interior of the Barbour home. He would show up with Hargrave lamps, Persian rugs and random objects from shopping sprees abroad or at flea markets.”

Steve Barbour, was only 12 when Mr. Davis began designing and building the house. At one point, as it neared completion, the banisters needed to be smoothed. Mr. Davis handed young Steve a router and said, “You can do it.” And he did it. Not perfectly, perhaps, but that’s OK. Steve, now 70, says, “The house takes your breath away. So you don’t notice any of the little things.” He adds, “It was always a joyful house. It’s emotional to see it go.”

Steve Barbour, shown here, and his two sisters are selling their parents’ home. The siblings are settled into their own homes (one of which is also designed by Mr. Davis). PHOTO: AARON WOJACK FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

James and Ellen Patterson are hardly Luddites. But the couple, who both work in tech, made an unexpectedly old-timey decision during the renovation of their 1928 Washington, D.C., home last year.

The Pattersons had planned to use a spacious unfinished basement room to store James’s music equipment, but noticed that their children, all under age 21, kept disappearing down there to entertain themselves for hours without the aid of tablets or TVs.

Inspired, the duo brought a new directive to their design team.

The subterranean space would become an “analog room”: a studiously screen-free zone where the family could play board games together, practice instruments, listen to records or just lounge about lazily, undistracted by devices.

For decades, we’ve celebrated the rise of the “smart home”—knobless, switchless, effortless and entirely orchestrated via apps.

But evidence suggests that screen-free “dumb” spaces might be poised for a comeback.

Many smart-home features are losing their luster as they raise concerns about surveillance and, frankly, just don’t function.

New York designer Christine Gachot said she’d never have to work again “if I had a dollar for every time I had a client tell me ‘my smart music system keeps dropping off’ or ‘I can’t log in.’ ”

Google searches for “how to reduce screen time” reached an all-time high in 2025. In the past four years on TikTok, videos tagged #AnalogLife—cataloging users’ embrace of old technology, physical media and low-tech lifestyles—received over 76 million views.

And last month, Architectural Digest reported on nostalgia for old-school tech : “landline in hand, cord twirled around finger.”

Catherine Price, author of “ How to Break Up With Your Phone,” calls the trend heartening.

“People are waking up to the idea that screens are getting in the way of real life interactions and taking steps through design choices to create an alternative, places where people can be fully present,” said Price, whose new book “ The Amazing Generation ,” co-written with Jonathan Haidt, counsels tweens and kids on fun ways to escape screens.

From both a user and design perspective, the Pattersons consider their analog room a success.

Freed from the need to accommodate an oversize television or stuff walls with miles of wiring, their design team—BarnesVanze Architects and designer Colman Riddell—could get more creative, dividing the space into discrete music and game zones.

Ellen’s octogenarian parents, who live nearby, often swing by for a round or two of the Stock Market Game, an eBay-sourced relic from Ellen’s childhood that requires calculations with pen and paper.

In the music area, James’s collection of retro Fender and Gibson guitars adorn walls slicked with Farrow & Ball’s Card Room Green , while the ceiling is papered with a pattern that mimics the organic texture of vintage Fender tweed.

A trio of collectible amps cluster behind a standing mic—forming a de facto stage where family and friends perform on karaoke nights. Built-in cabinets display a Rega turntable and the couple’s vinyl record collection.

“Playing a game with family or doing your own little impromptu karaoke is just so much more joyful than getting on your phone and scrolling for 45 minutes,” said James.

The Patterson family’s basement retreat ‘encapsulates the joy in the things that we love in one room.’ John Cole

Screen-Free ‘Escapes’

“Dumb” design will likely continue to gather steam, said Hans Lorei, a designer in Nashville, Tenn., as people increasingly treat their homes “less as spaces to optimise and more as spaces to retreat.”

Case in point: The top-floor nook that designer Jeanne Hayes of Camden Grace Interiors carved out in her Connecticut home as an “offline-office” space.

Her desk? A periwinkle beanbag chair paired with an ottoman by Jaxx. “I hunker down here when I need to escape distractions from the outside world,” she explained.

“Sometimes I’m scheming designs for a project while listening to vinyl, other times I’m reading the newspaper in solitude. When I’m in here without screens, I feel more peaceful and more productive at the same time—two things that rarely go hand in hand.”

A subtle archway marks the transition into designer Zoë Feldman’s Washington, D.C., rosy sunroom—a serene space she conceived as a respite from the digital demands of everyday life.

Used for reading and quiet conversation, it “reinforces how restorative it can be to be physically present in a room without constant input,” the designer said.

Laura Lubin, owner of Nashville-based Ellerslie Interiors, transformed a tiny guest bedroom in her family’s cottage into her own “wellness room,” where she retreats for sound baths, massages and reflection.

“Without screens, the room immediately shifts your nervous system. You’re not multitasking or consuming, you’re just present,” said Lubin.

As a designer, she’s fielding requests from clients for similar spaces that support mental health and rest, she said.

“People are overstimulated and overscheduled,” she explained. “Homes are no longer just places to live—they’re expected to actively support well-being.”

Designer Molly Torres Portnof of New York’s DATE Interiors adopted the same brief when she designed a music room for her husband, owner of the labels Greenway Records and Levitation, in their Lido Beach, N.Y. home. He goes there nightly to listen to records or play his guitar.

The game closet from the townhouse in “The Royal Tenenbaums”? That idea is back too, says Gachot. Last year she designed an epic game room backed by a rock climbing wall for a young family in Montana.

When you’re watching a show or on your phone, “it’s a solo experience for the most part,” the designer said. “The family really wanted to encourage everybody to do things together.”

Analog Accessories

Don’t have the space—or the budget—to kit out an entire retro rec room?

“There are a lot of small tweaks you can make even if you don’t have the time, energy or budget to design a fully analog room from scratch,” said Price.

Gachot says “the small things in people’s lives are cues of what the bigger trends are.”

More of her clients, she’s noticed, have been requesting retrograde staples, such as analog clocks and magazine racks.

For her Los Angeles living room, chef Sara Kramer sourced a vintage piano from Craigslist to be the room’s centerpiece, rather than sacrifice its design to the dominant black box of a smart TV. Alabama designer Lauren Conner recently worked with a client who bought a home with a rotary phone.

Rather than rip it out, she decided to keep it up and running, adding a silver receiver cover embellished with her grandmother’s initials.

Some throwback accessories aren’t so subtle. Melia Marden was browsing listings from the Public Sale Auction House in Hudson, N.Y. when she spotted a phone booth from Bell Systems circa the late 1950s and successfully bid on it for a few hundred dollars.

“It was a pandemic impulse buy,” said Marden.

In 2023, she and her husband, Frank Sisti Jr., began working with designer Elliot Meier and contractor ReidBuild to integrate the booth into what had been a hallway linen closet in their Brooklyn townhouse.

Canadian supplier Old Phone Works refurbished the phone and sold them the pulse-to-tone converter that translates the rotary dial to a modern phone line.

The couple had collected a vintage whimsical animal-adorned wallpaper (featured in a different colourway in “Pee-wee’s Playhouse”) and had just enough to cover the phone booth’s interior.

Their children, ages 9 and 11, don’t have their own phones, so use the booth to communicate with family. It’s also become a favorite spot for hiding away with a stack of Archie comic books.

The booth has brought back memories of meandering calls from Marden’s own youth—along with some of that era’s simple joy. As Meier puts it: “It’s got this magical wardrobe kind of feeling.”

In California, a John Marsh Davis-Designed Home Comes Up for Sale for the Very First Time

The Oklahoma-born architect’s Barbour House is unlike most Midcentury Modern buildings

Weary of ‘smart’ everything, Americans are craving stylish ‘analog rooms’ free of digital distractions—and designers are making them a growing trend.

Screen-Free ‘Escapes’

Analog Accessories