Meet the Locals: Bonnie from Berkeley
Step inside Bonnie Jones’s historic Maybeck home in the Berkeley Hills and learn what makes her neighborhood an ideal spot to settle into.
Photography by Ryan Kim
The Local
Bonnie Jones grew up in San Francisco, in “the Avenues,” a residential section of the city next to the Pacific Ocean where fog reigns. Later in life, facing “semi-retirement,” she decided to swap out the city fog for the Berkeley sun, and in 2009 purchased a home designed by famed architect Bernard Maybeck, a central figure in the Arts and Crafts movement of the early 20th century. Inspired by the spirit and warm weather of Berkeley, she settled on this spot in the hills, which she calls “Maybeck country,” where she rents out her historic home on Airbnb.
Her Home
Called “The Cubby” — the carriage house was originally Maybeck’s garage. The story goes that Maybeck had completed a fancy car dealership on Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco, and in thanks, they gifted him a Packard limousine, but there was a catch: he didn’t drive. So Maybeck and his son built this small house to store the limousine in. At the time he was an architecture professor at UC Berkeley, and according to Bonnie, in order to avoid looking pretentious he had his students “driving him around and dropping him off blocks from campus so that people wouldn’t see him getting out of this limo.”
The Cubby turned over once before it came to Bonnie, who fixed it up with her husband to what it is today. “It’s a lot of wood; it’s very warm; it’s got a great fireplace, and it’s all very simple,” she says. “It’s really just two large rooms and it has a nice view. You can sit on the deck and you never know what you’re going to see. There are a lot of squirrels, raccoons, and even chickens. My neighbor behind me always says, ‘This is Bonnie Jones; she lives behind my chicken coop.’”
Bonnie’s first experience with Airbnb was during a trip to Paris with her son. She warned him that the trip might be spendy; he suggested couchsurfing as a solution. “I said, ‘I don’t think I can couchsurf. I don’t even do hostels, so I’m not going to do couchsurfing.’” She suspected there might be something between couchsurfing and hotels, and that’s when she stumbled on Airbnb, with her first stay being “a magical time” where the host cooked them dinner in the garden of her apartment under the Eiffel Tower.
That inspired Bonnie to recreate a similar form of hospitality in her Berkeley home. She loves imagining her guests sitting on the deck enjoying the chimes of the Campanile — the Italianate bell tower on the UC Berkeley campus. Bonnie handles all the tasks herself, including the cleaning and gardening. “Gardening is like changing the bed. If I’m not changing the bed, I’m changing the beds.”
She decorated the home with vintage finds, scouring Craigslist or eBay, and a favorite of hers: the Oakland Museum White Elephant Sale, an annual fundraiser for the Oakland Museum that she frequents so often she remarks, “My god, they think I work there!” Guests are so routinely charmed by the house that at least twice a year someone offers to buy it from her.
Inside the house, Bonnie tries to keep it pretty minimal, but she says some tchotchkes make their way in anyway. “It’s the kinds of little things you wouldn’t find in a hotel, those little extra touches make the house.”
Her Neighborhood
For Bonnie, Berkeley is “the best of all worlds, because you can be up here among nature and thirty minutes later you’re in the city.” She also has a soft spot for her local butcher shop, where they have a “whole thing about how many miles they traveled to get that piece of beef. It’s all touchy feely, but for whatever reason I have come to know the guys, who are all very nice and helpful.” They also have a “fabulous eleven-dollar sandwich.” She always tells her guests to stop by the shop, and she likes that they feature a “sando of the day. It’s a fabulous sandwich, but you don’t have any choice. You can’t say I’d like mayo and this and that. It teaches us that choices aren’t always good. Sometimes it’s good to go with the sando of the day.”
Bonnie’s Berkeley Picks
Tilden Park: “Just up the road, visit Tilden Park for hiking, golf, or a ride on the Little Steam Engine, which is a short, but sweet open-air ride through the Tilden woods. Complete your outing with a ride on the hand-carved Herschell-Spillman merry-go-round.”
Golden Gate Fields Race Track: “This very un-Berkeley spot is just ten minutes by car, and free buses leave from North Berkeley BART. Great for weekends in the Turf Club, it’s a bargain day out and one of the few race tracks where the paddock experience is close-up and personal. Who knows: A long shot could pay for your weekend!”
The Local Butcher Shop: “A butcher shop that takes itself seriously — just check out their tidy uniforms and Irish caps. $11.50 during lunchtime will buy you a unique, gourmet sandwich. No choice here, only one “sando” is made daily. It’s best to call to reserve your sandwich.”
Gregoire: “Open mostly for takeaway, I recommend their elegant sandwiches and potato puffs, which are presented in cute octagonal boxes. Much like other Berkeley “foodie” experiences, the sandwiches are gourmet — you won’t find them anywhere else!”
The Cheese Board Collective: “Live jazz tunes flow freely while you stand in line waiting briefly for the most imaginative pizza of the day, which you can eat at the communal tables. I ask them to ‘double-cut’ mine and take home the leftovers. More high notes: They throw in extra slices on top.”
For Bonnie, sharing her home allows her to stay in touch with a younger generation. She says that baby boomers can often feel ignored: “Sometimes walking down the street people might glance for a moment and think ‘Holy moly, she’s old’ and they just go on about their way.”
“Sharing my home gives me the opportunity to know more young people, and know what they are interested in,” she says. “So many people, they sell their homes and they move off to some gated community somewhere or some senior living situation, and I think that’s a slow death. You really need to stay in the thick of things and this allows me that opportunity to stay in touch with the real world. It’s like an extended family in a lot of ways. It really is. And who could ask for more?”
About the author: Anisse Gross is a San Francisco-based freelance writer and editor whose work has appeared in The New York Times, TheNewYorker.com, The Guardian, Quartz, Lucky Peach, The Believer, BuzzFeed, and The San Francisco Chronicle, among other publications.
About the photographer: Ryan Kim is a travel and lifestyle photographer for Airbnb, who loves daydreaming about climbing rocks, roasting coffee, and winning his cat’s affection.
