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Ken Moholt-Siebert lives north of Santa Rosa on a farm and vineyard planted by his grandparents. Like his grandfather and great-grandfather, he is an architect, licensed currently in California and Oregon. Ken was born and raised in Berkeley, and of course the work of Maybeck and Morgan and other Bay Area architects were a great inspiration to him. But he also had an education in practical construction at the farm in Santa Rosa, where he spent many a summer and holiday in his youth. |
Ken studied at Cal Berkeley and then Pomona College (where he met his wife, Melissa) and then at the University of Oregon, and he and his wife lived in Portland for twenty years. He studied poetry and art and architecture and Ancient Greek and then architecture again, obtaining a Masters of Architecture in 1993.
After obtaining his credentials, Ken worked for a not-for-profit community design firm, which worked with Community Development Corporations and other groups in distressed areas of Portland, especially close-in NE Portland. Ken designed quite a bit of infill housing in what in what are now very trendy neighborhoods in Portland. There was a real need to make the new houses fit in well with the traditional, pre-WWII houses there, and still meet a budget. These projects were not only affordable, they were very highly efficient and used recycled materials and healthy sustainable building practices wherever possible and long before most people considered such things.
After this, Ken spent a few years working for the City of Portland in Design Review and then went into sole practice in 2002. Ken continued his work with quite a bit of infill development and apartment remodels, but now less often for Community Development Corporations and more often for folks building a house, or for small builders and small investor/developers, which included his wife and himself on occasion. Several of his projects involved rescuing older "historic" houses and apartments and moving and then restoring them.
In 2004, his grandparents having passed away, Ken began spending more and more time in Santa Rosa, and after a few years of back and forth, became permanently established in Santa Rosa, although he still has active architectural work in Portland.