Property Description

The Charles D. Stevens Estate is a rare architectural tour de force of imagination. Built in 1926 in San Jose’s historic Rose Garden, the residence was designed by renowned architect Louis Christian Mullgardt and is believed to be his final residential commission. Singular, romantic and deeply original, 838 Morse is an extraordinary composition of old-growth redwood, pine-clad interiors, light, shadow and geometry. Visible timbers form a rhythmic exterior framework of posts, lintels and diamond-patterned cross-bracing, while French doors repeat throughout the house, continually opening its rooms to the surrounding gardens. At its heart, a 40-by-20-foot great living and dining room rises beneath twelve-foot ceilings with the scale and ceremony of a hall. Original service bells, skeleton keys, a mechanical call box, hidden spiral staircase and other surviving details reveal just how completely Mullgardt considered the way the house would look, function and be experienced. Set on a rare 20,000± SF parcel, the home possesses an estate-like scale seldom found in the Rose Garden. Nearly 100 years later, 838 Morse still feels authored: original, richly atmospheric and alive with architectural imagination. Not frozen in the past. Not waiting to become something else. Waiting... for its next great love affair.

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Andy Sweat