Educated at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris (1880–86), Maybeck worked briefly in New York City and Kansas City, Mo., before going to San Francisco. He joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, as a drawing instructor (1894) and served as the university's first professor of architecture (1898–1903). For the university he designed Hearst Hall (1899; destroyed by fire, 1922), using for the first time the laminated-wood arch; the Town and Gown Club (1899), a brick building with a wood “outrigger” cornice; and the Men's Faculty Club (1900), a free treatment of the Spanish mission style. Among his other public buildings are the free-Gothic First Church of Christ, Scientist, Berkeley (1910), and the Neoclassical Palace of Fine Arts for the Panama-Pacific Exposition, San Francisco (1915). His last large-scale commission was the Principia College campus, Elsah, Ill. (from 1938).

In residential design Maybeck emphasized height; many of his wood houses have high-pitched roofs. From 1907 he built some reinforced-concrete houses, and later he experimented with concrete-coated burlap (Bubble Stone) as a lightweight, inexpensive, fireproof surfacing material.