Shibata Tea House
and Garden

Hayward, Historic Resource Evaluation [HRE], 2022

Located on a one-acre site in the southwestern corner of the approximately 26-acre Mt. Eden Business Park at 25801 Industrial Boulevard in Hayward, the Shibata Tea House and Garden is a Japanese-style walled garden and associated tea house/residence and with a central pond and landscaped gardens. Initially built in 1933 with numerous modifications and expansions over the next several decades, the property is the last remnant of the former Mt. Eden Nursery, a flower nursery which three generations of the Japanese-American Shibata family operated for nearly 80 years, from approximately 1918 to 1994. The property has remained inaccessible to the public after the development of the business park over 20 years ago, and given its age and lack of use, both the Shibata Tea House and Garden had been showing some signs of decay and deferred maintenance. It is the desire of the current property owners of the business park to provide continued maintenance of the property while securing or ‘mothballing’ it until an appropriate public use can be found in the future. Brewster Historic Preservation was hired by the owners of Mt. Eden Business Park to confirm the historical significance of the property at the local, state, and national levels, to identify the character-defining features of the property worthy of preservation, and to prepare a ‘mothballing’ plan. In addition to being designated a City of Hayward Cultural Landmark in 2004, Brewster Historic Preservation found the Shibata Tea House and Garden to be eligible for listing in the California Register of Historical Resources and the National Register of Historic Places as an individual resource, at the local level, because it meets all of the state and federal criteria required for a finding of historic significance. Work on the HRE was begun in November 2021 and was completed by January 2022.