Elements of Japanese Architecture and Design

Artistic License :: A Guild of Artisans presents its annual design lecture:

Elements of Japanese Architecture and Design

An illustrated talk by Debey Zito

Wednesday, 4 March 2020
7:30–9:00 pm
The Hillside Club
2286 Cedar Street, Berkeley

$15 general (advance tickets); $10 HSC members (at the door)

Debey Zito is a highly regarded furniture maker and interior-design consultant based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

With lush imagery from a recent trip to Japan, Debey will focus on elements of traditional Japanese architecture. She will touch on how these details have influenced a few of our most brilliant designers in Art Nouveau, Prairie, and Arts & Crafts. She will also refer to Japan’s influence in the Mid-Century Modern movement.

Debey Zito has been designing and building furniture for over four decades. Many of the pieces include carvings by her partner, Terry Schmitt. Increasingly, interior design work has become a larger creative focus.

Debey has lectured across the country on Furniture Design, Arts & Crafts Furniture, and Japanese Design.

A mystery building reveals its history

2028 Ninth Street (photo: Daniella Thompson, 2019)

The Niehaus-Rosano Building is a reminder of Ocean View’s melting-pot past.

The singular Stick-style Victorian building standing on the corner of Ninth and Addison streets is instantly recognizable to many Berkeleyans by the Drink NEHI sign painted on its northern wall. This sign evokes the days when a succession of grocery stores on the ground floor supplied this West Berkeley neighborhood with its comestibles.

Yet the building, unusually ornate on the upper floor and decidedly plain below, poses many questions that had remained unanswered for decades. Long believed to have been constructed in 1890, the building was revealed through recent extensive research to have had a far more convoluted (and more absorbing) history.

A newly published article by Daniella Thompson tells the story.

Photo: Daniella Thompson, 2019