An excerpt from Bernard Maybeck,

The PT Barnum of the Local Set, by Gray Brechin

"Few architects sustain the popular affection Bernard Maybeck enjoys almost a quarter century after his death. Arthur Brown, Jr., may have been more tasteful, Frank Lloyd Wright more revolutionary, but Maybeck's eccentric work and personality continue to inspire love.

Locally, having a Maybeck is equivalent to living in a Monet."

Maybeck came to California in the early 1890's after short stints in Florida and Kansas City. Although he lived in bohemian Berkeley, close to the stimulus of the University and the patronage of its faculty to hangers-on, he commuted daily to a long series of offices in San Francisco.
E. B. Powers House, ceiling detail
With the young Willis Polk, Ernest Coxheade, and A. C. Schweinfurth, he helped create what has become known as the First Bay Tradition of residential architecture.

Certainly, Maybeck's most popular work was and remains the Palace of Fine Arts, built for the Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915 -- when Maybeck was 50 years old. The building, meant to evoke ancient Roman ruins redolent of melancholy, was so successful that it was left standing long after the fair's other plaster palaces had been razed, and it was eventually rebuilt in tinted concrete."