465 Fourth Street East, Sonoma

The owners of this Spanish style cottage in Sonoma’s eastside neighborhood hired Alice to assess the historic character of the house in anticipation of remodeling it.

Samuele Sebastiani built the cottage ca. 1931 as part of his efforts to develop the west side of Fourth Street East with rental housing for his winery/cannery just north of the area. He had completed a similar development project on the east side of Fourth Street East in the 1920s. Both of these building campaigns had the goals of beautifying Sonoma, employing unemployed laborers during the Depression, and creating rental income for the Sebastiani family. Ninety years later, the property remains in the Sebastiani family.

Alice determined that the house is historically significant at the local level because of its association with Samuele Sebastiani’s real estate development of Sonoma from 1910-1944, for its association with a person significant to local and regional history (Samuele Sebastiani) and as a prototypical example of one of Samuele Sebastiani’s modest rental cottages from the 1920s-1930s. Alice’s work has since been incorporated into a later project to identify an historic district along this corridor of Fourth Street East.