2 Innovative Houses Respect Surroundings
Two new houses designed by San Diego architects respond to changing social patterns and illustrate ways of respecting neighborhoods without cloning the look of nearby buildings.
The house Eric Naslund designed for himself in Golden Hill wraps its U shape around an old mock orange tree that came with the property. Naslund borrowed tall dimensions from Victorian houses in the area and incorporated stucco and clapboards like those on other buildings close by, but he combined these references into a dynamic design bound by slightly off-kilter geometry.
Since the late 1970s, architect Ted Smith has advocated a design approach he refers to as “blendo.” Smith borrows forms and materials from nearby buildings and blends them together into houses that seem both fresh and familiar.
The latest concoction to come from Smith’s architectural Osterizer is the home of the Carnick family in Del Mar Terrace, a coastal neighborhood just south of Del Mar proper, where Smith built his first blendo house in 1979.
Naslund built his house for the rock-bottom construction cost of $68 per square foot (not including land). The three-level, 2,200-square-foot home proves that it can still be affordable to build a dream house from scratch in San Diego, if one is willing to buy a lot in lower-priced, overlooked neighborhoods and invest “sweat equity” in painting and installing floors and other items.
Naslund’s house consists of a pair of tall putty-colored stucco boxes that contain primary living areas, joined by an entry tower sheathed in yellow clapboards, with the boxes flanking a central courtyard that includes the orange tree.
The ground floor includes the garage and rooms that can be used as offices or bedrooms for future children, with living and dining rooms on the second level and the master bedroom and a rooftop deck on the top levels. There are no interior hallways; rooms flow easily from one to another.
Some neighbors were at first puzzled by this assemblage of three boxes jostled together, with rooms and windows placed not for the sake of creating a neat exterior, but to gain views and natural light.
“That’s one thing the neighbors have reacted to,” Naslund says. “The house presents to the street what is contained inside. There is no attempt to create a facade to the neighborhood. One person said that, once they came inside, the outside made sense, and that ‘it’s just like an architect to do things from the inside out.’ ”
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Recognizing the reality of busy schedules and his casual lifestyle, Naslund gave his house a compact but comfortable kitchen with stools next to a counter for casual meals. This informal dining area looks out through sliding aluminum doors to a redwood deck shaded by the orange tree.
Naslund’s house does not have separate family and living rooms, only a living room, an economical, sensible use of space considering that most people who have them seldom use formal living rooms.
With crime rates often in the news, security is on the minds of many San Diego homeowners. Some resort to living behind forbidding security gates, but Naslund’s house mixes security with warm gestures to the neighborhood.
It has a low security wall and gates in front, but second-level living and dining rooms are plainly visible from the street, and the living room has a small deck that makes a friendly gesture toward the sidewalk.
Adequate daylight and cross ventilation make sense in any house, but it’s surprising how many new San Diego architects don’t make maximum use of these qualities in their residential designs.
The U-shaped plan of Naslund’s home grew out of his desire to preserve the orange tree and offer views of its gnarled old limbs from most rooms. The plan also provides rooms with daylight from four sides and allows operable windows all around that make the most of coastal breezes.
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In the Del Mar Terrace neighborhood where the Carnicks live, concrete block, clapboards, stucco, steel, glass and wood shingles are common materials. Smith used them to define distinct parts of their house, such as the garage-base of concrete block and the steel-and-glass living room, with these discrete parts stacked together like building blocks that follow the natural terrain of the sandstone bluff. Gravel-and-tar roofs slanted in different directions add kinetic energy.
Deborah Carnick, a student of Smith at the New School of Architecture in downtown San Diego, helped out with the design, especially with fine details such as cabinets and other interior items. She says she wants to be an architect because she doesn’t think most houses respond to the ways people actually live.
“We looked at how we had lived in other houses, with our family of four (including two sons), and we really didn’t use a living room,” she said. “And the formal dining room was actually the place where we would end up doing various projects. We really lived in the kitchen-family room area. The idea with this house was to have one central living space that would serve as kitchen, dining and living room.”
The Carnicks spend many of their waking hours in a large central living space that includes a kitchen with maple and cherry kitchen cabinets and a checkerboard floor of colorful vinyl tiles--this economical, durable, catchy floor is a Smith trademark.
With the main living space all on one level, the Carnicks’ wheelchair-bound younger son can get around easily, aided by an elevator that rises through the open core of the house.
Space saved by not having traditional living and dining rooms went into rooms the Carnicks really use, such as a small library and a studio-activity room where Carnick works at her drafting table and the boys play with an electronic keyboard or radio-controlled cars.
As Smith notes, the idea of California houses that could be wide open to warm weather through huge windows and sliding doors died out during the late 1970s, when California adopted stricter energy-conserving building codes.
But the Carnick house proves that, with intelligent design and energy-conserving devices such as insulating “dual-glazed” windows consisting of two layers of glass instead of one, it is still possible to build a house that embraces the outdoors.
South-facing glass allows low winter sun to help warm the Carnicks’ house, and the sun warms extra-thick concrete floors that retain heat and radiate it back into the rooms after sundown.
Smith gave the house a steel frame, which made it structurally feasible to open up the entire corner of the main living space to the garden with two 8-foot-square sliding aluminum doors, and to leave the interior radically open.
The master bedroom, for example, is a loft over the main living space, with no walls for privacy, but since the boys have their own rooms and recreation room on lower levels, privacy is seldom an issue.
In San Diego, the past 10 or 12 years have marked a blossoming of fresh architectural talent in San Diego, especially when it comes to the design of houses.
Historically, San Diego has been a conservative place where progressive architecture was not often encouraged.
Irving Gill, San Diego’s most famous architect, built the last of his stripped-down, Mission-inspired houses in San Diego before 1920, and it was roughly 30 years until architects again made a break with traditional period styles.
Well-known San Diego architects from the 1930s and ‘40s include Richard Requa and William Templeton Johnson, who designed Mediterranean revival houses of white stucco with tile roofs.
During the ‘50s and ‘60s in San Diego, architects including Lloyd Ruocco and Homer Delawie brought the Modern movement to San Diego, departing from nostalgia to design houses without period detailing that featured open, casual plans and strong visual and circulation connections between indoor and outdoor spaces.
Then during the late 1970s, Smith, along with Rob Quigley, Tom Grondona and Randy Dalrymple, started designing houses that explored new ways of addressing contexts with sculptural, less static combinations of forms and materials. At the same time, Los Angeles architect Frank Gehry was designing his first far-out houses of chain-link fencing, concrete block and other formerly low-brow materials.
Smith, 44, and Naslund, 32, are respectful of Gill and of those architects who came after him in San Diego, but they belong to new generation of architects attempting to come to terms with an increasingly complex society, in a city that still has conservative attitudes toward architecture.
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“I’m impressed Gill was able to do the kind of work he did in a small town, for some of the most conservative but wealthy families (such as the Marstons and Timkens),” Naslund says. “He talked people into a very pared-down approach that probably ran counter to their upbringing and value systems.”
Smith has sympathy for young architects such as Naslund who want to design “calling card” houses for themselves that call attention to their talents.
“It’s a different world for these young architects than it was for me, when you could buy a lot in Del Mar Terrace for $15,000 and put a $30,000 house on it,” Smith says. “It’s not possible anymore to do the things I was able to do, and it doesn’t seem fair.”
