No Barriers to Creativity
It used to be that walls were a functional sort of thing: They were exclusionary; they put up barriers. They separated one room from another, one house from another and houses from the street. By definition, they were the most static feature of a structure.
Now, it seems, a wall is not merely an important design statement, but also can set the entire tone for a home, especially when it is the front wall, the one that faces the street, the first thing visitors see.
That is the case at Don and Carol Julien’s home in Newport Beach, a remodel, and at Doug and Rebecca Wood’s new home in Laguna Beach, a reconstruction in an area razed by fires two years ago. The design plans for the Woods’ new home won the 1994 Laguna Beach Architectural Guild Award. The architect for both projects was Horst Noppenberger of Laguna Beach.
“Walls can be so many different things,” Noppenberger said. “You can start with an exercise in creating privacy, but then you begin to project things, to imagine the mysteries that might lie on the other side. I think it goes back to childhood memories, that feeling of mysteries behind walls.”
At the Julien residence, formerly a contemporary ranch-style home like any other, the feeling is now one of wonder. “It gave the home a whole new perspective,” Noppenberger said. “Now it’s a fairy tale, playful and animated, childlike in some ways.”
At the Wood residence, the curve of the site, and the desire for a wall along that curve, provided the genesis of the entire home design. The wall came to reflect, or symbolize, the “geophysical forces in the surrounding landscape.”
It even has a fissure.
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The wall at the Wood home is practical. It creates a private domain, a courtyard where the couple’s child can play. In an area prone to fires, a wall made of noncombustible materials--in this case cast concrete--can mean extra protection. It protects the inhabitants from the sounds of automobiles along one side--the home is at the intersection of two steep roads--yet does not block the view of the canyons on the other.
Because the wall was built on a slope, concrete caissons had to be sunk 18 feet into the earth for stabilization. The wall is 75 feet long, and, at one end, 13 feet high. There’s both a feeling of fluidity, that it’s slicing through the hill, and a feeling of solidity, that it anchors the home on the hillside. According to a project description, it is as if without the wall the residence would slide out of its site.
The home takes over where the wall--actually two walls, since the fissure is complete--leaves off.
“We wanted the project to mesh with the geography,” Noppenberger said. “We began to see a kind of up-and-down movement in the tops of hills, the way they cropped out. So the walls are splitting; the roofs are curving; things are moving, things are very much alive. . . . The architecture is very dynamic.”
Added partner David Ewing: “The geometry of the house [is such that] everything flows from one center, but takes off in different directions, peeling away like the layers of an onion.”
The roof indeed curves upward at one corner; it’s not meant to be pagoda-like, but rather to create a suggestion of invitation or entry. A roof terrace takes advantage of southwesterly ocean views. Using cast concrete, mahogany and copper as primary building materials is intended to fulfill the owners’ request for “warm and fuzzy.”
From the street, Noppenberger noted, “you get to a certain perspective where there is this very heavy solid mass of wall, formed of organic materials, above which floats this very light-looking metal roof. You get a duality of lightness and heaviness, and between them, because the glass is dark, almost a void.”
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All is light at the Julien residence. Light, fun and magical.
“Carol [Julien] is quite like that herself, and a lot of those ideas [for the wall] really came from Carol, from her art and from her travels,” said Noppenberger, whose wife, Arianna, served as co-architect on the project. “Carol liked the purity of contemporary Greek architecture and the childlike playfulness of the Spanish architect Gaudi.”
The wall, which constitutes the entire front of the house built in 1963, is white and punctuated by geometric cutouts on both sides of a central gate and archway. You can see beyond the gate to a small courtyard, and the effect is that of a secret garden. A small circular drive and the planters within echo the curves of the archway. The wall also incorporates a triple garage, part of which serves as Carol Julien’s art studio.
Carol Julien was inspired by a nearby home; it also had been ranch-style, with the house-courtyard-garage layout. In that case, homeowner Sachiko Root’s wall connected all three elements and gave her home a completely new, and more elegant, appearance. Julien used the same concept, even copying the arch, but the results were very different.
“The first couple of designs we did [in 1993] for Carol were much more literal, much more pragmatic, very rigid,” Noppenberger recalled. “Those designs were scrapped completely.
“Carol was concerned that it would be a formidable wall, where you’d feel separated. She wanted a wall of invitation, that would be alluring, that you’d want to see what’s on the other side. She is not a person I’d say who wants to create space between her and her neighbors. She’s a very open person.
“We began to talk about the idea of the wall being a kind of storyboard,” he continued. “As we spent more time with Carol, the more the direction went into the lyrical. It became more fantasy-like.”
Says Julien: “If you saw Horst’s first wall--he gave me a feudal castle with turrets. Very Teutonic. So I drew him the wall.”
According to Julien, the geometric shapes suggest a half moon, the Trinity and--”What could be prettier, geometrically or esoterically?” she asked--a full circle.
The new facade heightened the garage by three feet, giving the home a far more substantial appearance. From a construction standpoint, however, it’s still only a wall.
“Because it was a small project, people in our office [Horst/Arena Architects] typically wouldn’t have spent a lot of time on it--they’d try to knock it out real quick,” Noppenberger said. “But working with Carol on it was so much fun. She lived and breathed it. The [two months] it was being built [in the summer ‘93], she was so passionate--the passion that she had for it was contagious, really.”
The effects are lasting. Not only is the wall a permanent expression of her passion, but Noppenberger never once stopped smiling the entire time he was talking about it.
