With the right combination of orientation and materials, architect Tim Kobe transforms an awkward property near a freeway into a house with a million-dollar view.
In its first ten miles heading north from San Francisco into Marin County, California Highway 101 crosses two bridges. You've probably heard of the first. The Golden Gate Bridge could be a safe vote for the finest arrangement of landscape and structure in the world. But the Richardson Bay Bridge, a few winding miles of freeway later, better embodies the sad phrase "American highway engineering." A thicket of concrete pylons supporting a pimple-like rise in the highway above a murky tidal estuary, the bridge provokes no rapture aside from weekday traffic backups.
Unless, that is, you're sitting barely a baseball's throw away--in the dining room of the Edgewood House. In this nearly $4 million, 4,100-square-foot house perched on the edge of Richardson Bay in the shadow of the freeway, architect Tim Kobe of the San Francisco-based design consultancy Eight Inc. has transformed a liability into a declaration of philosophy. When framed by the house's limestone walls, the light reflecting off the windshields of passing cars becomes a flickering beacon of modernity.
It nearly wasn't that way. The Edgewood house is one of two "estate properties" at DeSilva Island, a planned community of sixty-two condos "priced from under $1 million." Set on a peninsula that juts out into Richardson Bay (a side bay of San Francisco Bay) the land had remained undeveloped for years despite the growth of the surrounding area. It was a developer's nightmare: protected wetlands, a great blue heron nesting ground, a Miwok Indian archeological site, and to complicate matters more, neighbor to the roaring traffic of the Richardson Bay Bridge. But it was also one of the last buildable sites on the water in Marin County, with drop-dead views of San Francisco.
When the current developer, the consortium LB DeSilva LLC, took over the project in 1997, designs were already in place for the condos. "But nobody really wanted to build what was actually approved for the site," Terry Keene, a member of the development team, says. At least by the standards of suburban residential development, LB DeSilva had higher architectural aspirations--driven, one suspects, by the higher price the group could attract. With the bulk and height of the condos defined by "political realities," as Keene puts it, their redesign was mainly cosmetic. "It came down to how could we make them with French doors and articulated windows as opposed to sliding glass doors and aluminum frames," he says. The switch seems to have anticipated buyers' desires well; by late March the last of the sixty-two units, with floor plans up to 2,500 square feet, had been sold at prices up to $1.6 million. No matter that their ersatz Arts and Crafts architecture seems to have had Botox injections, with smooth, pasty walls and overblown bay windows.
And yet the condos' high-end predictability makes the design of the two single-family homes, whose sites had been grandfathered into the development, all the more surprising. "We didn't want to come out with something rote, and say, 'Gee, we'll just build two houses that match the condos.'" Keene explains. "The view was just so spectacular, and yet the challenge of the site was such that we wanted to see what people would produce." LB DeSilva hosted a mini architectural competition, receiving a half-dozen submissions for each site. Then the group hedged its bets. "Certainly we had an eye on marketability," Keene says. "You're building to an unknown person, and there's always the potential that you could exceed the vision of the marketplace." This was to be a strange hybrid: an environmentally sensitive spec house by a large developer designed by a serious architect on a beautiful, if flawed, site.
The other of the two freestanding houses, designed by a Taliesin grad, Paul Gilger of Sonoma County's Hedgepeth Architects, juts out into the water on stone columns. With wide eaves, a sweeping staircase, and a stained-glass oculus in its central rotunda it is, Keene thinks, "a little safer."
But Kobe's Edgewood House couldn't afford to be safe. The developers knew that selling a $4 million spec house in the shadow of a freeway required a more rigorous architectural solution--and even then, as Keene put it, "a special buyer." Kobe's plan draws its power from the site's inherent tensions. Any design had to be open to the bay and its moist air, but closed to the freeway and its ceaseless sound. It also had to accommodate existing eucalyptus trees (active heron nesting sites) and mitigate runoff into the bay.
The result is a strict orthogonal plan with perpendicular planes of opposing character. The walls facing the bridge are rough-hewn limestone; those facing the bay are primarily glass. As organizing principles go, this is Miesian in its clarity. Six stone walls create five bays that insistently direct your attention toward the water, while dampening the sound and vibration of the freeway. The heft of the stone, working in concert with the house's sod roof, also helps with heating and cooling retention. As if in appreciation of their raw power, Kobe has held tight to the stone walls' consistent lines, choosing instead to modulate the space either vertically or through the glass and plaster walls that run perpendicular.
The vertical play begins at the entrance. The house is sited across a narrow cul-de-sac from the condos, which do not exactly rest gently in the landscape. Their brown shingles and heavy-handed patios emphasize their bulk. The Edgewood House, in contrast, has no street facade except for a glass box penthouse that pokes up to eye level. The rest of the house spills down the hillside toward the water's edge, although its sod roof creates the impression that it is underground, a feeling emphasized as you descend the front steps. As the limestone walls rise around you, the background whoosh of the freeway softens and the intense sweetness of the air--a result of the proximity of both forest and ocean--seems contained within their bulk. "Once you descend down in there it's a more cloistered experience," Kobe says. But just when the effect begins to become tomb-like, your line of vision drops below the cantilevered roof and the view opens up to a perfectly framed panorama of San Francisco and the bay.
And yet in the realm of trophy houses this jaw-dropping effect is remarkably understated. "We were not coming to the market as a typical wealthy owner of a particular site who would be able to indulge his deepest and greatest fantasies limited only by his pocketbook," Keene says. "Here we were, a builder wanting the design to be congruent with the rest of the development, even though we wanted it to be unique. And we wanted it to be artistic and responsive [to the site], but we also wanted a profit."
It is a familiar formula for Kobe and Eight Inc. The firm has cut its teeth in the upper echelons of commercial high design, including working on an ongoing basis with Apple on their retail stores around the world--the sort of project that requires both design vision and considerable professional chops. Kobe had also worked with one of the developers of the Edgewood House on a shopping mall in Hawaii, an experience that reassured them he wasn't "an artist as opposed to a guy living in the real world," Keene says. For his part, Kobe helped LB DeSilva work through the sorts of amenities expected in a house at this price. For example, he pushed the Bulthaup kitchen system, but still found a place for the sauna they insisted on (although the new owner now plans to turn it into a wine room). It's a reminder that this is still a spec house--necessarily a product as much as a piece of architecture.
But that characterization is not big enough to contain the surprising effect of the highway's proximity. The western edge of the house, closest to the Richardson Bay Bridge, is marked by a low limestone wall; along it runs a water feature with a series of weirs determined to cover up the traffic noise. But just inside the house, in the dining room, the architecture seems to take the opposite tack: a broad picture window perfectly frames the cars whizzing past.
We are accustomed to houses that blend indoors and out. Less familiar are houses that use their own sense of permanence as a platform from which to watch the changing world. In this house, aside from the traffic, there's the tide going in and out, the sod roof shifting color with the seasons, and the fog lifting and resettling on the bay. The thickness of the stone walls emphasizes the contrast with the puncture of the glazing; solid gives way to transparency, immobility to dynamism.
"I'm nutty enough to have gotten to the point where I almost see that as a kinetic sculptural experience," Keene says. "You have this duality that you're there in your own kitchen sipping on your own coffee in your own bathrobe, and yet there's the world going by, anytime of day. There's this integration with the world at large."
