Modern Ranch

This video is brought to you by TAN, our debut hardcover book celebrating 10 issues of the local project. Use the code BOOK5 at checkout for a 5% discount. The Sea Ranch is frequently cold and wet and really windy. The sea is a very rugged landscape with a lot of cliffs. It's not kind of gently sloping down to sandy beaches. It's actually a pretty rugged, tough environment in a lot of ways, but very beautiful. I'm Judith Schein. I design the Ramirez House with Norman Mellar at the Sea Ranch. The Sea Ranch is 10 miles of northern California coast, about 120 miles north of San Francisco. The history is fairly interesting. It was kind of a very idealistic vision by a developer named Al Boqui. He had this idea of transforming what was a Sea Branch with a pretty degraded environment to transform it into a kind of slightly ideal sort of utopian community that would have strict design guidelines, both for buildings and for the way that the buildings sat in the landscape. They began to look at buildings that were already in the landscape, historically northern California. And they were very attracted to weathered barns that were made out of local timber and had managed to withstand all this kind of harsh climate over a very long period of time. Working with Lawrence Halprim were the architects, Maura Linton, Turnbull Whitaker, a group of four architects working together, and Joe Escherich. Halprim laid out the design and design guidelines for the landscape, which involved kind of building up some pre-existing, basically windbreaks through big cypress trees and preserving meadows between them and streams running through them. And then designing a site plan that called for houses to be essentially built into the landscape around the edges of the meadow, preserving ocean views, and preserving lots of communal open space. So these young architects developed houses that were based on the kind of design principles of these weathered barns with sloping roofs and they didn't have big overhangs because of the strong winds and the possibility of uplift. But the architects were also interested in then making, even if they made a fairly simple box on the outside with maybe a few kind of b So there's this idea about the design guidelines having kind of strict rules for the outside in terms of slopes and materials, and inside allowing much more complex and articulated space. And then those houses themselves were built into the landscape in very specific ways following Lawrence Halprim'site planning principles. Because of the siting, there'sea caves in the middle of the site, so we couldn't actually build there. So instead we sited the main house on the kind of northern edge and the guest house on the southern edge with the space in between that gets southern light, so you could actually use it during the day when it's warm enough. The interiors had a lot of built-in furniture, often built into this idea of building into the landscape, and the bathrooms and sometimes kitchens were kind of treated I have to say Gabriel was a really amazing client and was very involved in the design, and he came to know Sea Ranch, so he had inclinations that lent themselves to a Sea Ranch- He wanted to live on the coast, someplace that was really connected to nature, and when you see the designs, we built a whole series of models, not just in drawings, and you could get this big complex space by leaving them all open to each other, but differentiating them with built-in furniture and, I think there was a question about whether the bedroom wanted to have some ability to close off or not, but once it was built, This other tradition of modern architecture looked at more complex spaces, but also a much bigger palette of materials. In Sea Ranch, the original buildings all had a lot of wood on the inside and created a kind of very warm environment that, again, related to nature and the environment outside, rather than having a lot of white walls on the inside, So we used a lot of wood and a lot of different woods on the inside. It's what I refer to as a wood medley. So the built-in furniture is all Douglas fir veneer plywood. The plywood that you see on the inside is all marine-grade Douglas fir plywood. The wood on the objects and outside the fence is all ipping. Then the guest house is a concrete floor because, But we chose those materials because, again, they're very traditional for Sea Ranch and they create a kind of warm environment rather than a kind of cool modern environment. It's a different form. Again, it's another tradition of modernism where you're not afraid to use color and material and texture to articulate a space. And it's a tradition that a n It's a challenge, I think, for an architect who, But when you're in a community that has a storied history that, as an architect, you are well aware of because you've studied it and has very specific guidelines to follow, there's a kind of balance between what you want to do and respecting not only the guidelines, but the history, and also find a way to make things more contemporary in a certain way and to have a little bit more of your own ideas and at the same time really respecting the main ideas of the founders. This video is brought to you by 10. Our debut hardcover book celebrating 10 issues of the local project. 10 unites the very best projects from the first 10 issues of the publication into a beautiful single vol With over 400 pages of architecture and design for both leading and emerging creatives, the hardcover book takes readers on a curated and meditative journey. The premi With worldwide delivery available, have 10 delivered directly to your door. Head to the link in the video description to purchase your copy now and use the code BOOK5 at checkout for a 5% discount.