Quizlet Founder's Berkeley Treehouse Gets a Midcentury Reboot

Quizlet founder Andrew Sutherland now owns a midcentury Berkeley Hills house with a sunken chili-pepper-red velvet conversation pit that faces a dry-erase whiteboard. Butler Armsden Architects and Aquilo Interiors restored the Robert Ratcliff-designed home to its original specification, then rebuilt it around Sutherland's requests.

The house sits at the foot of the Berkeley Hills, on a slope overlooking the San Francisco Bay. Ratcliff, a regionalist architect, gave it a steeply pitched gable roof, teak paneling, and subtly angled walls. The design teams restored or replaced those elements in near-identical fashion. Sutherland founded the learning software company Quizlet in 2006.

"The goal was to honor what came before while also pushing for something unexpected," says Carmen René Smith, founder of Aquilo Interiors. "Andrew himself felt like the inspiration because he was so down for doing such cool stuff. He really likes science, math, and collecting experiences—he wanted his home to reflect that."

What survives and what is new?

The historic redwood siding was salvaged and reinstalled wherever possible. Beside it sits a custom sapele front door carved with hundreds of rings that Smith drew by hand to represent growth. A triple slider opens onto an indoor-outdoor game room with the velvet seating, a Ben & Aja Blanc Moon Light recessed into the ceiling, a chess table niche, and two Freifrau Manufaktur swing loungers.

The whiteboard is not decoration. "I've spent my career in education, and many of my fondest memories are in front of a whiteboard, figuring out a hard math problem or a new product idea," Sutherland says. "I wanted my home to be a place where people could work on hard problems together."

How personal can a kitchen get?

In the teak-and-black basalt kitchen, Butler Armsden opened up the layout so Sutherland could cook while entertaining. Smith commissioned black-and-white striped cement floor tiles from Da Vinci Marble based on a 1950s magazine image Sutherland loved. The kitchen trash can got a different handle from the bronze Rocky Mountain Hardware Barre Grip used elsewhere, because Sutherland said he needed it easily identifiable.

The sourcing had limits. "I wanted a sanctuary that would feel timeless, but it was hard to source appliances without Windows 95–looking screens," Sutherland says. "We made everything tactile with physical knobs and buttons."

The adjacent dining and living areas sit beneath a wooden cathedral ceiling with exposed beams. Dinner is served at a custom white oak and powder-coated steel table surrounded by eight cane and maroon mohair Cesca Chairs. Around the preserved concrete and painted metal fireplace, Smith mixed a Lawson-Fenning Portola Sofa, vintage caramel leather armchairs, and a rearrangeable custom modular sectional. "We were designing how people connect with each other, and that was very important to him," Smith says. "He approached it with a lot of curiosity."

What does the restoration change for the house?

A suspended staircase, introduced by Butler Armsden to connect the three levels, leads to a minimalist, Japanese-influenced primary bedroom. Smith hung an oversized Nelson Angled Sphere Bubble Pendant above a custom teak bed with a speckled bouclé headboard and a saffron velvet coverlet. A library labyrinth with a switchback path leads to the office, where the built-in teak desk continues onto the deck.

"Andrew's a tech person. All he needs is a laptop, so why not have an outdoor desk as well?" says Federico Engel, managing principal of Butler Armsden Architects.

Outside, the newly excavated lower level holds a gym, and the backyard has a hot tub, teak-and-mesh chaises, and a Gio Ponti–inspired privacy screen. "For something intimate, there's nothing better than having a cocktail from the top deck, looking out on the expansive view," Sutherland says. "It's a bit chilly most nights, but with the built-in heaters, you can stay up chatting all night." The project shows how far a restoration can bend toward one client's habits before it stops being a restoration at all — Ratcliff's shell survives, but nearly every interior decision now answers to a single resident.