I moved to San Francisco in 1980 to design a compound of 3 traditional Japanese residences. The clients had been transferred to the bay area for work and found the house prices way beyond their budget. My task was to see if by pooling resources and building houses on affordable land that they could get into the home ownership market. When I found a beautiful wooded parcel in the Oakland hills just east of San Francisco and they decided to move forward with the project.

One morning midway through construction on the first house, a gentleman trudged up the steep slope to the building site. He was a visiting professor from Japan at The University of California at Berkeley and had been watching the construction with interest. He felt that people in Japan would be interested in what I was doing and asked if I would be interested in having the project published. The following year I was fortunate enough to have it published in "Authentic Home," the largest architectural journal in Japan. I was pleased with one of the comments in the text: "Mr. Brockob captures the spirit of our aesthetic and reminds us of how far we have traveled away from it."