John Davis Wagenet (1892–1974) An architect in the long shadow of Julia Morgan

Ruth & John Wagener

Plot 52D

John Davis Wagenet was an architect whose career unfolded largely out of public view, yet whose work and training places him squarely within one of the most important architectural lineages in California history.

Born on November 24, 1892, in Cincinnati, Ohio, Wagenet came of age at precisely the moment when architecture in the American West was professionalizing, formalizing, and finding its voice. He made his way west and enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied architecture during the 1910s, a period when Beaux-Arts principles, structural rigor, and regional adaptation were being actively debated and refined. 

San Simeon (San Simeon Chamber of Commerce ©)

After Berkeley, Wagenet entered the professional orbit of Julia Morgan, the pioneering architect whose office trained a generation of designers. Working as a draftsman in Morgan’s design office, Wagenet was exposed to large-scale institutional work, exacting construction standards, and the collaborative studio culture required for projects of national ambition. Contemporary references and later historical accounts credit him with participating—at least in part—in work connected to Hearst Castle, placing him among the many skilled but largely anonymous hands behind that extraordinary enterprise.

By the 1920s, Wagenet had established his own architectural practice in Oakland, maintaining offices in the Financial Center Building downtown. His work focused primarily on residential and neighborhood-scale commissions, particularly in the East Bay and Contra Costa County, where new suburbs were rising amid rolling hills and newly subdivided tracts.

The Wagenet Home, 1597 Fernwood in Oakland

One of his most personal commissions appears to have been his own family home at 1597 Fernwood Drive in Oakland’s Montclair district, a picturesque Tudor-style residence completed in 1928. With its steeply pitched roof, half-timbering, and careful siting among mature trees, the house reflects both Morgan’s influence and Wagenet’s own sensitivity to landscape and domestic scale. It stands today as a rare, tangible signature of an architect who otherwise left few overt calling cards.

Wagenet’s most prominent known public project emerged just over the Berkeley hills in Walnut Creek. In the early 1930s, local developer Robert Noble Burgess commissioned Wagenet to design an adobe-brick clubhouse for the newly developing Lakewood neighborhood. Envisioned as both a social center and a sales tool, the roughly 4,000-square-foot structure was, at the time, reportedly the most expensive house ever sold in Walnut Creek. With its Mediterranean-influenced massing and dramatic lakeside setting, the building served as a focal point for community life and a showcase for aspirational suburban living.

Despite these accomplishments, Wagenet never sought architectural celebrity. He joined the American Institute of Architects later in his career and appears to have practiced steadily but quietly, content to build well rather than build a reputation. Like many architects trained in the Morgan office, his legacy survives more clearly in buildings than in headlines.

In 1924, Wagenet married Ruth Roselle Macomber, and the couple remained together for decades, sharing a life that spanned profound changes in California’s built environment—from pre-automobile suburbs to the postwar boom. John Davis Wagenet died in Oakland on July 21, 1974, at the age of 81, and was buried alongside Ruth at Mountain View Cemetery, surrounded many of the architects and planners of his era, including Julia Morgan, Bernard Maybeck, Geoffrey Bangs and Carl Warneke.

Sources: Find a Grave memorial for John Davis Wagenet; UC Berkeley “Blue & Gold” yearbook listing “John D. at Berkeley 1914”; Walnut Creek Historical Society Lakewood clubhouse description; historical real-estate documentation and images for 1597 Fernwood Drive, Oakland; Julia Morgan Architectural History Project references.