Mary and Albert Schneider commissioned this house and lived in it until the mid-1910s. Albert Schneider (1863–1928) was a professor of pharmacology at the University of California. The Swiss chalet-style house, regarded as one of Maybeck’s masterpieces, escaped Berkeley’s 1923 wildfire.

In 1926 Professor Alfred Louis Kroeber (1876–1960) purchased the house. A nationally prominent anthropologist, Kroeber studied the cultures of Native Americans in the West and founded the U.C. Museum of Anthropology. He and his wife, Theodora, author of the best-selling Ishi in Two Worlds, raised four children here, including the world-renowned writer Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018). Le Guin’s essay “Living in a Work of Art” eloquently describes the seminal role this house had in shaping her life.