An architectural gift fit for a dog

[...] he wrote the architect who’d designed the singular stone-and-concrete house his father was building himself in the hills of San Anselmo and asked Frank Lloyd Wright if he would design a home for his black Labrador, who was 4 (that’s 28 in dog years, the 12-year-old noted).

“He was designing the Guggenheim at the time,” says Berger, now 72, who’d offered to pay Wright for what’s now widely known as Eddie’s House with money he made from his Marin Independent Journal paper route.

Some time later, Berger — who’d asked for a design that would be easy for him to build but relate to the family home — received architectural drawings for an elegant triangular structure with trademark Wright touches like extended eaves, unusual angles and a subtle entryway.

Berger’s father, Robert, an engineer who taught at College of Marin, devoted 20 years of his life to constructing the beautiful Berger House, including the doghouse — but unfortunately not before Eddie died.

“He had no desire to go sleep in that doghouse,” recalls Berger, a retired Sacramento cabinetmaker and high school shop teacher.

[...] the home Wright designed for Berger’s family leaked a lot.

For Wright to design a structure like that for a 12-year-old “was a cruel joke,” Berger says cheerfully, sitting in the Civic Center cafe with his wife, Irene.

Berger says he could have sold the doghouse to the new owners of the Berger House, but opted to give it to Marin, through the Frank Lloyd Wright Civic Center Conservancy Commission, so his daughter, grandchildren and the public can see it.

Deborah Voigt, the sterling dramatic soprano recently forced to cancel performances of her “Voigt Lessons” show at the SF Opera Lab because of a ruptured eardrum, will be giving private lessons and master classes when she joins the full-time faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music this fall.

Voigt’s mastery of major Wagnerian roles and the exceptional technique required to do it will attract in-demand larger voices to the school, notes César Ulloa, who chairs the Conservatory’s voice department.

New Century Chamber Orchestra’s violin-playing music director, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, leads her final season with the ensemble, which celebrates its 25th anniversary and her fruitful nine-year tenure.