In 2016, a San Francisco family with a passion for mountaineering asked us to help them expand a property near Lake Tahoe in the Sierra Nevada. Their extreme mountaineering activities include ice climbing, winter camping and backcountry skiing. The site came with an existing guesthouse and unrealized main house. Located on a North facing slope, the site looks down to Martis Valley and up to the south at an 8,000 square foot extinct volcano through a natural screen of 100-year-old Jeffery and sugar pine trees. The 3,800 square foot program included four sleeping rooms, a gathering space, garage, and private outdoor space.
VIEW PROJECTA luxuriant forest of Jeffrey and Sugar Pine mixed with White and Red Fir covers this two acre site at roughly 6,300 feet above sea level in the Martis Valley near the north shore of Lake Tahoe. Gently sloped, the site falls toward the south with views to the Northstar California ski resort. The simple rectangular plan is placed to minimize impact on the site, leaving a three-dimensional screen of 115 trees 60 to 90 feet tall surrounding it. The smaller second level contains sleeping rooms.
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The building site had a significant influence on the design for this house. Layered with intense geologic history at the base of a three-million-year-old volcano, the site is a north-facing 20-degree slope with equal parts refuge and prospect at 6,300 feet above mean sea level. Consisting of volcanic sediment from ancient flows and strewn with boulders up to 15 feet in diameter, the site is in an open stand of second-growth Jeffrey Pine and White Fir trees. The vertical, plumb lines of the tree trunks, stripped bare from years of deep snow fall, reach for the light. Standing upright at an angle to the slope, they provide a constant reference to the perpendicular horizon in the distance. The harsh winters leave the ground sparse yet partially covered with a mat of pine needles and cones. Large waist-high clusters of manzanita group together and climb the slope in an organic, opportunistic pattern.
VIEW PROJECTGlen Ellen has many barn-like houses that confusingly mash up two design vocabularies, pasting residential-style overhangs and fenestration on barn forms in a kitschy blend. In contrast, this 3,900-square-foot house, dubbed the “Big Barn,” draws authentic inspiration from the site’s existing Tack Barn, which we had previously renovated into a bunk house. A simple, rectangular, two-story form emerged with an asymmetrical gabled roof. The shorter side of the roof faces the southwest sun and reduces heat gain to the structure. Fenestration is limited to this exposure as well and is organized as thin, full-height ventilation shutters that reference traditional barn building.
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In the early 1900s, writer Jack London made his permanent home in Glen Ellen, California, a less populated part of the California wine country 50 miles north of San Francisco. Drawn by the land, London believed in the redemptive qualities of rural life. As the first step in creating a similar kind of retreat in Glen Ellen for themselves, a San Francisco family and repeat client asked us to reclaim a 1950s tack barn as living space. The family wanted to stay in the barn on weekends in order to get the lay of the land for future planning and constructions.
VIEW PROJECTSet amidst a volcanic boulder field in a pine and fir forest, Creek House is a family retreat that inhabits an existing outcrop clearing at the edge of the spring fed Martis Creek. Near the base of Lookout Mountain at Northstar California Resort, the house is conceived in plan as three directional bars that slide between and alongside the boulders and trees. The largest contains the main living areas and sleeping quarters. A margin sized bar houses the entry and support spaces and connects the third bar that contains a tandem, drive-through garage to the house. A south facing, 140-foot long, insulated concrete wall demarks the spaces longitudinally and situates the house in the mountainous terrain.
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This is a full-time beach house for a car passionate family of four situated across from Burnt Cedar Beach in Incline Village, Nevada on the north shore of Lake Tahoe. Prior to being pulled up the hill to flumes and rails destined for Virginia City, logs were staged here as the mountains around the lake shore were logged during the silver mining years of the 1860s.
VIEW PROJECTThe clients are a couple of environmental scientists who, along with their two sons, relocated from the Oakland Hills to the warmer climate of Orinda. Their commitment to sustainability, including a request for net-zero energy performance annually, was evident in their thinking throughout the design process. A three-bedroom program began as a remodel of a 1954 ranch house at the foot of a hill next to a seasonal creek. After finding the existing structure and soils to be unsuitable, the direction settled on reusing the existing footprint under the shade of a Valley Oak that had grown up close to the original house. The surviving portion of the original house is the fireplace which was wrapped in concrete and utilized for structural support. This made additional grading unnecessary and allowed the new house to maintain the same intimate relation to the old oak.
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Shoreline is essentially a cast-in-place concrete box designed to withstand a harsh location on the north shore of Lake Tahoe. The fire resistive and maintenance free shell builds a pavilion-like mezzanine plan in section with a two-story living space on the beach. The mezzanine houses bedrooms and a family room that overlooks both the living space and on grade garage below. An underground garage is accessed via car elevator and will store the client’s car collection.
VIEW PROJECT“A larger place for the family to engage in fun and games together connected by a bridge to our house,” was the request by our client. The resultant project takes disciplined form in a two story, south facing rectangular barn-like space. The flexible oversized room for games is flanked on each end with yoga/exercise to the east and a screened outdoor cooking and dining porch to the west. It stacks over two private bedrooms below that open north to the forest.
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Stretched along a south facing hillside in San Francisco’s East Bay, this permanent residence for a family of four is planned to allow extended visits by family and friends. Arrival by car winds below the house up the slope to a concealed courtyard between the house and hillside. A gradually unfolding entry experience weaves its way back toward the light and view to Mount Diablo through a concrete and glass one story main floor living space. A cedar rain screen clads a second story of family bedrooms.
VIEW PROJECT100 miles north of San Francisco on Highway One, The Sea Ranch is a community originally built in the 1960s as an experiment in building an environmentally sensitive community. Visualized by the Landscape Architect, Lawrence Halprin, development was planned to mesh with the existing land forms and minimize disturbance. Specifically, house parcels were organized within Cypress hedgerow wind breaks planted by ranchers to protect livestock in the early 1900s. Minimal, thematic architecture was used by founding architects, Joseph Esherick and the firm, Moore Lyndon Turnbull Whitaker that responded to wind and sun as initial form givers. An organic, common sense approach allowed the landscape to live and the houses and communal buildings to be built as a settlement based on similar values and construction methods. The houses here appear as weathered boats headed into the wind to minimize its impact.
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