IT’S ALL THEY NEED
DOUG RUCKER puts on his baseball cap, slides open the back door of his house and heads toward his architectural office just a few steps off the patio. OK, then, his wife decides, time for her to get back to work too, and off she goes out the front door and down a high, rounding driveway to her art studio, clutching a mug of hot tea.
Standing before a wall of windows, Rucker flips through a set of meticulously detailed blueprints for Kris Kristofferson’s new house, relatively chaste in size at 2,000 square feet, but capacious compared to his own. For 10 years, he and Marge Lewi-Rucker have lived comfortably and contentedly in a three-room structure that is just over 700 square feet.
Thirty years ago, on a dance floor in Malibu, Rucker, a residential architect, and Lewi-Rucker, an artist and therapist, both in their 40s and each in longtime, collapsing marriages, “finally found our real loves,” as he describes their meeting. By 1984, they had left behind their respective former lives, their big houses and the bulk of their belongings to be together.
If living in tiny quarters was what made the most sense at their ages, then that was that, they would do it. Scrap the plans for the larger house along with the dismaying mortgage they hadn’t expected, then downsize, pare down, let go -- whatever handy jargon you want to ascribe to it -- and make a go of it.
After his divorce, with his split from the sale of the house he had designed and built on a Malibu promontory, Rucker managed to buy an acre of rural property choked with waist-high mustard weeds off Kanan Road, 1,700 feet up in the Santa Monica Mountains.
“I got as close to Malibu as I could afford,” he says.
Even today, with the landscape immediately surrounding the house cleared of its tangle of wildness, and a decomposed granite lawn just outside the front door raked in serene Zen-like patterns, the place has the aura of an outlying region you might stumble upon on an exotic trek.
Rucker drew up plans for an 1,800-square-foot house, but by then, he and Lewi-Rucker were in their 50s and realized they couldn’t take on 30 years of hefty monthly payments.
Instead, Rucker built a 500-square-foot workspace for himself with built-in furniture, expanding it a year later with a bedroom and bathroom addition so Marge could move in.
For nine years, until he built a separate 550-square-foot office, Rucker worked at a draft board in the living area. “Returning from work was easy,” says the easily amused Rucker, laughing in his quick, vigorous way. “I’d turn off the lights and walk across the room to the couch. I was home.”
Rucker also put up a prefab greenhouse studio for Lewi-Rucker near the entry to the property, where she could create her Prismacolor drawings. To filter the sun, he lowered the floor of the makeshift art studio and suspended a shade cloth over a metal framework he designed from chain-link railing; Lewi-Rucker made panels for the ceiling out of foam board that she covered with silver-painted tar paper.
There’s a built-in bed where they sleep when they have guests, who sleep in the house on the other built-in bed that calls to mind a berth on a schooner.
Two people can only pull off the tricky business of living in a condensed manner if they’re willing to make a stoic assessment of what they can and can’t hang on to and to be vigilant about organization.
“I tell all my clients to make three piles: the throw-out pile, the maybe pile and the keep pile. The keep pile is what tugs at your heart,” says Rucker. “Then I tell them to toss piles one and two. If you have of lots of ‘maybe’ stuff, you’ll feel like a maybe person. Surround yourself only with things you love.”
The Rucker rule: Bring into your house only those things you absolutely do not wish to be without. You’ll feel a lot better. Throw out that unsightly chair, get rid of clothes you don’t wear or items that are only marginally satisfying, give away books you’ve read (unless you love your library, in which case make a beautiful one). Eliminate all that creates disharmony. A harmonious house contributes to a harmonious life.
Both Rucker and his wife have everything they need, they insist, and more important, what they really want: pictures of their children (she has four, he has three), his mother’s books, his five volumes of a self-published autobiography (two more are on the way), “special little tchotchkes” her children made, the easel her father, a painter, brought back from his days in Paris, the drafting table used by her father and also her mother, a children’s book illustrator, movie videos and CDs they store in the built-in cabinets. (Built-ins are everywhere, and key to living small.)
“I’m not that attached to things, anyway. I’m more drawn to dancing, music, reading, my work, nature,” says Lewi-Rucker, taking a sideways glance out the window toward the limpid sky brushed with loose, vapory clouds.
Having, as they do, doors and windows opening from almost every direction onto thick clusters of chaparral, the exaltation of steep mountain ranges circling all about, the lawn rising and falling on various levels, they escape the claustrophobia that, say, a city apartment of the same size might engender. A feeling of expansiveness takes over.
“We don’t feel we’ve been denied,” adds Rucker. “I had already lost everything once before when my first Malibu house burned down in the fires in ’70. It looked like a pile of steel spaghetti on the ground. It was a total houseclean. But I felt strangely liberated. Possessions possess the possessor. If all of a sudden you don’t have anything, then nothing owns you.”
Since 1958, when the Illinois native set up his one-man architectural office in Southern California, he has designed more than 200 residences in the Malibu area -- all unmistakably what computer systems engineer Ron Munro, a two-time client, refers to as “a Doug Rucker.” Instantly recognizable but never formulaic.
By that he means, in part, liberal use of floor-to-ceiling glass softened by overhangs, liberal use of warm woods, post and beam construction, unusual sensitivity to the site and to the personalities of the inhabitants, a flawless fusing of indoors and outdoors, a sense of contained drama without the staginess of the architect-in-need-of-applause.
Rucker gets out of the way, just as he intends his houses to get out of the way of the inhabitants.
“A house has to stay in the background and not compete with the owner for attention,” says Rucker. “It shouldn’t be an excuse for the architect’s ego. In a trophy house, the house is the thing and not the people. In my architecture, the people are the thing and the house is the backdrop. I could design a structure that looks like a gorilla lying down. It would be good publicity, but it wouldn’t be a good house.”
Rucker, says Louis T. Busch, a Malibu Realtor for 56 years, is known not just for the beauty of his houses, but for their function. “He makes houses livable. Some architects miss the point. They don’t do a good job of taking advantage of the view, or taking into account your real needs, like closets. He does it all very well.”
After 47 years of envisioning residences, Rucker’s passion and energy for his work -- as distinctive, as appealing, as fresh as ever -- is undiminished, his philosophy for what makes good architecture, and for how we ought to live, unwavering. He is emphatically immune to architectural fads.
A house should be indigenous, he maintains: of its time and of its place. All those still-proliferating borrowed styles you see here -- Mediterranean, Colonial, Provincial, Tudor, Roman Villa, Spanish Revival -- are not regional, he points out, and most are bad facsimiles of buildings meant for other ages, other places and other climates. In short, they don’t belong here.
“We’re in Southern California in 2005,” Rucker says and pauses, as if that has said it all. “New houses that import styles from another time and place betray the imaginative possibilities of the present day. We sell ourselves short by not building our buildings. We’ve missed our opportunity to make our own character.”
A house should also have integrity, and the source of that integrity, he says, is “to have integrity in your person.”
Quality, not quantity. “A 20,000-square-foot house is a tremendous slap in the face to the whole environment.” Real, not fake. “I won’t build houses of false materials. Real architecture makes good ruins. Fake buildings become rubble and dust that blows away.”
In a no-nonsense “Doug Rucker,” what you see is what you get. No linoleum made to look like tile. No glued-on Styrofoam beams made to look like wood. No plasticized countertops made to look like marble. No stamped concrete made to look like cobblestone. “A house has to know what it is.”
Rucker is given to speaking of structures and materials in anthropomorphic terms, as if they were living, breathing, cognizant beings: “Stone likes to be on the ground. It gets nervous and unsettled the higher it gets. Wood loves to be high too, because it was once a tree. Wood does not like to be painted. It likes natural finishes. Brick does not like to be painted. It wants to be brick. Lay brick as a patio and it will thank you every time you walk on it. Stucco and drywall love to be painted. They are unhappy and incomplete when they are not. They mate with paint for life, like ducks and geese.”
But he is just as inclined to be plain-spoken. “I treat houses basically as a shelter. The chief purpose of a house is protection from the elements, even if the elements are as mild as here in Southern California. It’s also a place to put your stuff, as George Carlin says.”
The biggest mistake architects and clients make, he says, is not thinking of architectural design as a total environment for living. Landscaping is part of the design, lot line to lot line. There should be a soft interplay between indoor and outdoor, and every room should have its own outdoor space.
“He put windows in my garage. I never had that before,” says client Carolyn Craft, a retired teacher. “Everything Doug does is thought out, beautiful, simple -- cabinetry, his use of space, glass walls, beam ceilings. I lie in bed and just stare at my ceiling. You can always tell a Doug Rucker house. It’s like walking into peace.”
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Visualizing a California dwelling
Architect Doug Rucker, who has built more than 200 houses in the Malibu area, including his own 700-foot structure, has strong feelings about the right way to build a house in Southern California:
“Houses should be of their time and of their place. Indigenous houses -- native to the area -- are timeless houses.”
“Because we’re in Southern California with its wonderful views, I visualize my houses as basically glass, with the solid parts being the cabinets, the closets, the walls to the bedroom and bathroom.”
“Houses need protective overhangs for generous glass areas to save cooling bills, prevent interior deterioration, cut glare.”
“A California indigenous house is in concert with the site. It sings the same song. It faces the right way, it yields when the land yields, it juts when the land juts, it blends, flows, capitulates. It loves the site and is married to it.”
“The indigenous house should be made of the fewest possible materials in order to create a harmony of structure. The less simple it gets, the less powerful it gets.”
“Houses should be thought out in every detail. Details are what make it work.”
“A house should be built of real materials: wood, bricks, stucco, tile, glass.”
“A house wants to be optimistic. Natural wood and off-white are two of the most optimistic colors.”
“Everyone is happier in harmony. Eliminate all that creates disharmony. Fill your house solely with what you love.”
“To create harmony, think of design within the context of the next largest entity. That is, an accessory such as a lamp should be selected considering the furniture. The furniture should be selected considering the room as a whole.”
“Living in a conflicted house, like living with a conflicted person, is difficult. A conflicted house may have one of the following: inconvenient floor plan; minimal storage; poor light [or] heat; steep, narrow stairs; bad flow.”
“I think of a house as an integrated part of a total environment for living. That includes all the property, lot-line to lot-line. There should be an integration between the landscaping and the house, with no sense of demarcation.”
“Every indoor room should have its own outdoor space. It’s a wonderful way to increase the apparent size.”
“A California house should have a semi-enclosed outdoor transition space that will make your passage from jungle to home and from home to jungle a relaxing experience. Our climate allows for it.”
Barbara King can be reached at home@latimes.com.
