James D. Wickenden

James Donald Wickenden was born on May 25, 1900 in Los Alamos, California. He was a descendent of two Spanish soldiers who came to California in the 18th Century (Pablo Cota on his father’s side and Manuel Villavicencio on his mother’s). Wickenden’s mother (Margaret Sauer Wickenden) lived in a two-story craftsman style home built in the 1910s, located on Johnson Drive in San Luis Obispo across from the San Luis Obispo Mission.

In 1918, Wickenden enrolled in the UC R.O.T.C. program at Berkeley where he studied for seven years, switching majors during that time from Engineering to Architecture. While there, he met his future wife, Virginia deLormier Booker, in a life drawing class. She was a reader for the department of Decorative Arts. Virginia also collected Guatemalan textiles and sold various objet d’arts in her own shop on Bancroft Way (where Zellerbach Hall is presently located). Wickenden graduated from the UC Berkeley School of Architecture in 1925 and he married Virginia in the same year in Pasadena.

Wickenden’s first job as a draftsman was in the office of Clarence Tantau in San Francisco. He then worked in William W. Wurster’s office on California Street in San Francisco. In 1937, he moved to Honolulu, Hawaii with his wife and young daughter, where he worked for a series of different architects (including Claude Stiehl, Lemmon Freith & Haines, and Dickey and Vladimer Ossipoff). In June 1942, Wickenden moved back to San Francisco, rejoined Wurster’s office, and worked there until his death in January 1968 in Berkeley.

Some of Wickenden’s independent projects include: the Joseph & Minnie Gilman house on the Arlington in Berkeley (built before 1928), the Cordelia Gilman house on Dolores/12th two NW in Carmel-by-the-Sea (built in 1936), the Kenneth Douglas residence in Oahu (built 1939-40), and the Rosen house on the corner of Bay View Place and Euclid Avenue in Berkeley. He also won a national home/cottage design competition.

Source: James Donald Wickenden Biography from Margaret Wickenden.