Designer’s Home Makes a Statement

On a remote peak in Jamul, designer David Klages is building a house that should someday rank him among San Diego’s great architectural innovators.

For four years, Klages, who once made a living doing more conventional landscape and building design, has dedicated himself to alternative modes of construction.

First came a large dome house in Ramona. Its shell was made by spraying the underside of an inflated fabric dome with “shotcrete,” a material more commonly known as stucco.

After completing that project in 1988, Klages and his wife, Donna, moved into a mobile home on their hilltop acreage in Jamul, and Klages began designing and building his dream house.

Framing took several months. Instead of conventional wood construction, Klages’ house is built around steel rebar and wire mesh. Walls consist of 6-inch-thick polystyrene--the lightweight stuff used to package electronics equipment--sandwiched between 2-inch layers of shotcrete.

Building inspectors are doubtful when they first see Klages’s designs, but they rally after he shows them specifications prepared by his engineer proving that the structures are several times stronger than they need to be.

Klages combines his creative construction ideas with a sensitive eye for design. Tract housing typically covers terrain leveled by heavy equipment. Klages likes to work his designs around nature.

“I see the house as a piece of sculpture that’s grown out of these rocks,” he said, nodding toward several granite boulders. He’s wrapping a swimming pool around one of them, and he’s designed his house around an old California live oak.

To get there, you follow a rough dirt and asphalt road for a couple miles before turning into his driveway, a narrow, ribbon of concrete which climbs toward his peak at a breathtaking angle.

Klages gave a tour of the project while a stucco crew mixed a batch of shotcrete.

He led a visitor up a dirt path, to the edge of the pool, currently just a pit lined with a network of steel reinforcing. Behind the pool is the guest house, where Klages and his wife plan to live until they can afford to build the main house.

Its steel framework stood against the sky like the skeleton of some latter-day Gothic cathedral, rebar and mesh bent to form curved walls rising to a pointed, Gothic peak.

Klages decided not to use the inflatable dome method because his wife prefers square and rectangular rooms, not the odd floor plans that domes produce because they fail to easily accommodate conventional furniture.

The guest house will have two levels: an enclosed work space and an open poolside entertainment area, including a fire pit, up top, and lower level living quarters including a bedroom, bathroom and kitchen.

Windows in the side of the southern wall will capture spectacular views to Mexico. Three sets of sliding doors will open onto a cantilevered deck which juts precariously into a canyon like a giant diving board.

Klages plans to move into the guest house in three or four months. He guesses he will have spent about $200,000 for the land, site preparation, roads and the 600-square-foot guest house.

Since the project is an experimental prototype, costs are not nearly as low as they could be eventually.

“If we got this into mass production, costs would drop by probably 30%,” Klages said. “Then you save probably 50% on energy and 70% on maintenance. If you look at a building over 30 years, mine won’t need maintenance. It might need paint in five years, but nothing will attack it--mold, vermin, termites.”

Klages said the house will be extremely efficient. The walls will keep interiors warm during winter and cool during summer.

Windows are placed to catch low-angled winter sun. It will heat up floor tiles inside, which will radiate warmth after the sun has set. The walls will help keep the rooms warm, or, during summer, protect them from the heat outside.

The steel-and-concrete construction is also fireproof.

In the event of fire, “We will be the only ones here who will be able to relax in the pool and watch everything around us burn,” Klages said.

Not that the methods don’t have drawbacks. Klages doesn’t know how much the walls might crack as the building settles. While he says the house should be waterproof, it hasn’t yet gone through several seasons of rain.

So far, there has been interest in Klages’ building ideas, but no concrete results, other than the two homes.

Through a friend’s international consulting business, Klages proposed low-cost shotcrete housing for Uganda and for a Navajo Indian reservation in Arizona, but neither group opted for his innovative methods.

Surprisingly, banks--generally not open to revolutionary designs which could make loans more risky--haven’t closed their doors on Klages. The dome house was built with conventional bank financing, he said. Klages is building the guest house with a loan from a relative, but hopes a conventional lender will finance the main house--three telescoping structures resembling the guest house.

Klages, 38, has studied the work of a variety of design innovators, including San Diego designer and artist James Hubbell, whose mountain complex in Santa Ysabel uses a steel mesh-and-concrete technique.

A self-taught designer, Klages left college to travel the world and read books on his own. He began his career at 19 as a landscape designer. His heroes are people like Wallace Neff, the Southern California architect of the ‘30s and ‘40s best known for traditional home designs, but also the refiner of the balloon-form technology Klages used as the basis for the dome house.

Such innovation takes a tremendous personal commitment. Klages doesn’t seem worried that his large investment in his home might not result in commissions, or even a home that will retain its value in the conventional real estate market.

There’s a good chance his construction methods will never be accepted. Certainly, most designers who experiment with alternative modes of building never achieve widespread acceptance.

But Klages doesn’t care whether he becomes famous.

“I like adventure, and I consider this adventure,” he explained. “I went up the Amazon, I danced on tables at Carnival in Rio, and I visited the ruins at Macchu Picchu.

“To do experimental stuff is one of the hardest thing. You’re resisted by every agency. You have to really love it.”