Simply elegant

<p>It is, in every respect, a family house.</p><p>It has a family room with home theater and all essential sofa big enough for five. A mudroom for dirty paws and athletic shoes. A breakfast nook with banquettes by a window for family meals. An unfinished daylight basement filled with toys. Five acres of farm animals, with a barn, trees to climb and creeks to scour for tadpoles. And upstairs there are three bathrooms and four big bedrooms — three bedrooms for the kids and one for Dad and Dad — all off an extra-wide hallway.</p><p>When Robert and Maben Rainwater moved from San Diego five years ago to build a big family home from scratch, a place that not only beautifully incorporates the arts and crafts detailing they so admired but was completely functional for three energetic kids, they were prepared to be on the defensive. But they miscalculated how open-minded folks are in Sonoma County.</p><p>“When we came up here we were so disappointed,” Maben laughs. “Everyone was like, ‘So what?' There's no issue over us being an alternative family.”</p><p>The Rainwaters, who legally wed in 2008 during that brief window when the state was granting marriage licenses to same-sex couples, are firmly entrenched in the community of families with kids in Sebastopol. Robert is on the parent council of the SunRidge Charter School and coaches baseball. Maben is a Twin Hills School District trustee and coaches soccer.</p><p>“Our strategy is that what's best for the kids is for both parents to be involved in the community,” says Maben, who built up and sold a computer tech company in Canada and then began a new business marketing English art glass and porcelain in partnership with Robert, who was in banking.</p><p>The pair abruptly switched professional gears after building their two-story shingled home, rich in woodwork and inspired by the style of Charles and Henry Greene, brother architects from Pasadena who created their own distinctive iteration of the Arts and Crafts look back in the early 1900s.</p><p>The public can explore the house and meet the Rainwaters, a clan that includes Alexandru, 13, Nicholas, 12, and Kira, 5, during the Western Sonoma County Home and Garden Tour on May 16. All three kids will be stationed in the house to help direct and greet visitors.</p><p>The self-guided tour includes seven homes in the greater Sebastopol area. It is one of a series of home and garden tours in May and June that offer people a chance to see how other people do it — their style, their ideas, innovations, skills, problem-solving and aesthetics on the homefront.</p><p>Greene & Greene elevated Craftsman to a new level of refinement, incorporating Japanese architectural elements they had seen at the World's Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893.</p><p>The Rainwaters were particularly enchanted by The Gamble House, the crown jewel of Greene & Greene's work. Built in 1908 for David and Mary Gamble, the 8,200 square-foot home is owned by the city of Pasadena and maintained by the University of Southern California as a public landmark open for tours.</p><p>They were drawn to the look for its simplicity. The pair decided to not only become their own contractors but their own carpenters after the first bids came in for framing. The price of land may have been lower in Sonoma County — a deciding factor in their move north from San Diego five years ago — but the price of labor was not.</p><p>They were attracted to Sonoma County for its open spaces. Both men are from small towns — Maben in Ontario and Robert in Michigan. After adopting two baby boys from Romanian orphanages and later a daughter they have had since birth, they wanted their own kids to have the free-ranging outdoor life they experienced growing up.</p><p>They set up a woodshop in the barn and really went to work, doing a lot of the finish carpentry themselves, from the staircase and window casings to the chair rail molding and mahogany paneling. They created built-in cabinets, like one that consumes an entire wall in the dining room and bears strong resemblance to one in the Gamble house.</p><p>Robert mailed away for a mix and made his own concrete sinks and countertops in the bathroom, then paid to have Bohemian Stoneworks in Sebastopol create the stained-concrete counters in the kitchen.</p><p>Robert also made the built-in trestle table in the kitchen where the family assembles for virtually every meal.</p><p>The two had remodeled a couple of bungalows in San Diego. And after building their own, they became so adept that Robert got his contractor's license and the pair now remodel and build professionally. Their Mission Hills Development has so far done about 10 remodels, including the Castle Vineyards Tasting Room on Highway 121 in the Sonoma Valley.</p><p>The Rainwaters are still scrambling to finish fine details most visitors wouldn't even notice in a house that is strikingly elegant in its studied simplicity.</p><p>Although not an exact replica of a Greene & Greene home, the design and construction is inspired by their style, with details like scarf joints in the trim and dovetail joinery. Exterior clues range from the oversize cedar-shingle siding to the rafter tails extending out to the solid copper drain pipes and stained redwood trim.</p><p>The floors have the same diagonally set planks as the Gamble house, an attractive design that actually solved a particular problem for Mrs. Gamble.</p><p>“She had all these hand-woven Oriental rugs and the edges were uneven,” Robert explained. “She said if you lay the the floor straight you'll see how uneven they are.”</p><p>The pair splurged on light fixtures, contracting with a Southern California couple to custom-make fixtures true to the Greene & Greene look, with copper and leather straps. Some of the furnishings, like the master bedroom set, are manufactured after the look of real furnishings in the Gamble house.</p><p>The embarked on the work in early 2005 and moved in by the fall of 2006. The beauty of the house belies how basically simple the carpentry is, the two dads say.</p><p>“This is very straightforward. One thing we love about it is that almost all the cuts are straight cuts. There are very few mitered cuts. There is no crown molding,” Maben says. “That's just not part of Arts and Crafts.”</p><p>It is, rather, beautifully simple and simply beautiful.</p><p>“It's exactly what we wanted for the kids,” Robert explains. “A place where they can grow up with innocence and space.”</p><p><i>You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at 521-5204 or meg.mcconahey@</p><p>pressdemocrat.com.</i></p>