Sea Ranch home tour shows harmony with nature

The words Sea Ranch conjure up images of weathered wood cabins and barns - architectural sparrows with shed roofs that modestly blend in with the coastal meadows.

The Sea Ranch architecture is intentionally unassuming with natural materials, features, finishes siting and scale that respects the rugged coastline on which it sits.

Although not every house built on The Ranch is completely within the spirit of the original visionaries like the late Lawrence Halprin, who took great pains to design a land use plan that would result in a kind of development that would not destroy “the very reason for people to come here,” a great many do.

A half century after the first of those structures went up, Sea Ranch stewards are still committed to maintaining that original design ethos - that no building should upstage the landscape. Anyone hoping to build a home within the 10-mile long coastal enclave at the far northwest corner of Sonoma County, must work within a tight set of design rules that cover 18 pages and deal with every detail from the color of your wood stain to the plants in your yard.

“We were doing an exploration of ways to build that would be innovative and yet innovate for need, to be something that would work with the climate and the landscape and would become one with the place rather than something separate from it, and in a general way, that has prevailed,” said Donlyn Lyndon, a founding architect who worked on Condominium One, which has come to be emblematic of The Sea Ranch and is now on the National Register of Historic Places.

He also is an ardent keeper of the flame and author of “The Sea Ranch: 50 Years of Architecture, Landscape Place and Community on the Northern California Coast.” He has recently narrated an audio tour of The Sea Ranch that can be downloaded for visitors or viewed virtually at tsra.org.

For those who yearn to see some of The Sea Ranch’s homes from the inside, there is an annual architectural tour on Mother’s Day weekend sponsored by The Soroptimists of the Mendocino-Sonoma Coast. Falling this year on May 9, it will showcase the best examples of Sea Ranch Design through the years. Nine homes have been selected representing different decades, from the 1960s to the present.

Falling toward the end of a year-long celebration of the 50th anniversary, the tour will include a classic 1966 “Hedgerow House” at Black Point Reach designed by Joseph Esherick and built as one of six original demonstration or model homes with distinctive sloping roofs that are a signature of The Sea Ranch look. Esherick, a master of environmentally-sensitive architecture, went on to design The Cannery at Fisherman’s Wharf and the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The tour also includes an Esherick home built 30 years later across the meadow from The Hedgerow Houses.

For the 1970s there is a 1971 Charles Moore house with asymmetrical building forms and multiple levels and built-ins. Representing the 1990s is an award-winning home by Obie Bowman with redwood siding and corrugated metal roof. Bowman designed many distinctive Sea Ranch homes that have been featured in a multitude of architecture and design books and magazine.

There also is an iconic 1968 Binker Barn designed by Charles Moore and William Turnbull, both original Sea Ranch architects, that reference the North Coast’s farm buildings. And for the 1980s there is a Cluster House, also designed by Turnbull, with a land-sparing three-story tower and set within the redwood forest.

“We wanted to do something really different this year,” said Bob Hartsock, an architect himself who designed about 120 projects at The Sea Ranch. “We want to show how the architecture has evolved in carrying on the tradition of those first simple building forms. What is inspiring now is a new palate of materials that still ring true to the original simplicity of materials.”

Ushering in a new wave of architecture at The Sea Ranch is the home of radiologist Gabriel Ramirez, which manages to show how those original ideals can be reinterpreted in exciting new ways that are respectful of the founding ideals. The exterior is a mixture of nubbly board-formed concrete, Cor-Ten steel, which develops a natural rusty coat over time and Ipe, a tough, weather and rot-resistant Brazilian hardwood.

Designed by Norman Millar and Judith Sheine, it is a departure from the weathered cedar sheds of old Sea Ranch and yet is as earthy and natural as the first architects envisioned.

“One of the things that is interesting about that house is that it does carry forward a lot of the ideas we had at the original founding but it does them by thinking through to the root of the idea rather than taking the surface phenomenon,” said Lyndon, now 79.

It was a long and painstaking process to get it right. The house sits on a challenging lot with several underground sea caves running through the middle. Nothing could be built over the caves but the architects problem-solved by breaking up the footprint with a main house on the north side and a guest house on the south.

It took some five years to get the plans approved by the county and Sea Ranch design review committee, headed up by another original architect, Dick Whitaker. It took another three years to build.

“The house sits perpendicular to the view, but a view no less breathtaking, overlooking Smuggler’s cove with a northward view toward a ragged point. The garage is set with an earthen berm, blending the structure into the meadow on the other side.

Inside the house steps upward from the living and dining room overlooking the bluff. It steps up to a kitchen and a few more steps beyond to a guest room and study, finally ending at a master bedroom. The only enclosed rooms are the bathrooms, which project out in boxes from the house.

The interior walks are sheathed in Douglas Fir plywood. There are many built ins, most notably a long low bench with bookshelves beneath that stretches along the entire length of the living room wall on one side.

“It was really exciting and kind of fun,” said Sheine, who is head of the department of architecture at the University of Oregon. “When you’re working with something that has this significant architectural legacy it is a little intimidating, especially if you respect the original legacy. Not every house built here was really wonderful. We were conscious this was an opportunity to do something that was really in the original spirit of the architecture and planning.”

You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com or 521-5204.