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	Photo: Deborah Sherman

    Built in 1924, this once-bustling Masonic temple in North Berkeley’s Thousand Oaks neighborhood closed its doors in 1998 due to waning membership. Despite offers from zealous developers hoping to turn the 10,000-square-foot building into large-scale housing projects, the property laid stale on the market for two years, largely because of the city’s strict zoning policy and the neighborhood’s already heavily congested commercial component.
    Meanwhile, a West Berkeley–based art dealer, Katrina Traywick, and her husband were on the market for their first house—a nice, traditional place in Rockridge. “We were looking for a house where we could live cohesively with our art collection, but we quickly discovered that finding the right fit wasn’t as easy as we were hoping,” explains the proprietor of Traywick Contemporary, an art gallery. 
    As the house-hunting became more dismal, a friend of the couple—a fellow art aficionado—asked if they’d consider partnering with him and his wife in buying the Masonic temple and turning it into a four-unit condominium-style dwelling. The plan was that each 8 couple would live in a unit and sell a unit. It was a venture Traywick and her husband had never considered, yet they were immediately drawn in as it looked to be the perfect, albeit unconventional, solution to their quest.
    On paper it was the perfect plan, but as Traywick and her husband had no previous experience in homeownership, let alone residential development, things got tricky when it came to navigating the city’s regulations and dealing with the ambitious construction process. “We had no clue what we were getting ourselves into,” says Traywick with a laugh. “Had we known, we would have run away screaming.”
    But this savvy business woman, a Tennessee transplant, has always taken bold chances during her nearly 20-year career, which began when she won an entry-level job at the eminent art publishing house Crown Point Press and took off when she opened her own gallery a few years later. “Everyone thought we were crazy for buying the temple,” she says. “They told us it would be the ruin of us. Yes, it was stressful at times, but this project gave us the opportunity to be creative in ways we’d never had an opportunity to be before.”
    The project, headed by Oakland-based architect Alan Fleming, took two years to plan (18 months of that were spent working with the city and neighborhood, getting approval) and two years to construct. Although the building had remained sound since its original construction, it had to be retrofitted to accommodate seven decades worth of updated building codes. To comply, steel girders, moment frames, double-sided shear walls and new windows were installed.
    While the partnering couple took a quadrant of the building to create a dwelling within the restructured fourplex design, Traywick and family settled into a bottom unit boasting a comfortable 3,000 square feet. The home, which she and her husband share with their two children, was originally the temple’s dining hall and stage. Taking her cue from the building’s origins, Fleming designed the unit to have a spacious main floor while putting the family room and adjoining office up on the stage level.
    The dining room, kitchen and living area are perched on yet another tier, giving this otherwise wide-open space multidimensional character with distinctly different rooms. Because of the living space’s limited number of walls, the family’s assorted art collection can be seen from virtually every vantage point.
    Unbelievably, the maple flooring found throughout the unit is the original. After a good sanding, the once-dark floor boards were brought back to their original brilliance. “If you look closely,” Traywick says, pointing to subtle spots around the floor, as her kids roll their bikes and toys around the room, “you can see cigarette marks. You can still feel the building’s history.”
    The Masons, or Freemasons, for the unfamiliar, is a fraternal order (whose membership has included U.S. presidents, artists, entertainers and inventors). It’s not a secret society, but it is a society famously fraught with secrets.
    Three years after moving in, Traywick decided her new home would make the perfect space for continuing her work as an art dealer. In yet another one of her signature bold moves, she closed down her warehouse gallery on 10th Street, which she had maintained for seven years, and moved it in its entirety, including the work of the 15 artists she represents, into the family home. “I realized the inherent potential of the space to expand the ways in which I was able to represent my artists’ work,” she says. “Our current space has the ability to change how people look at or experience art by showing it in the context of real life.”
    With its relocation, Traywick Contemporary is stronger than ever. But, the question that begs to be asked is, how is it to raise a family inside an art exhibit? Traywick smiles at her kids as they sit happily drawing on the floor and says, “They’re so used to it. Art has always been part of their landscape and their lifestyle. Aside from occasionally having to be strategic about where things will and will not be displayed, there have been no issues with having the children live amongst the art. It has become an unintended educational opportunity for my kids and their friends.”
    Like everything else Traywick has accomplished in her own out-of-the-box way, this too has worked out fortuitously.