Construction Diary: At Sea Ranch, a Couple Build a "Forever Moving" Home Made to Change With Them
Four equal-size rooms open one onto the next via large barn doors, encouraging continuous motion throughout its modest footprint.
Four equal-size rooms open one onto the next via large barn doors, encouraging continuous motion throughout its modest footprint.
It wasn’t just that they wanted a place to grow old in, here among the pines and firs of the famed Sea Ranch community in Northern California. David Ross and his husband, Mark Dutcher, wanted a place to grow old with them—a house that would bear, with unfussy equanimity, the various marks of its making and remaking and maturation.
"There’s a lot of ‘finish fetish’ with architects," says David, an architect himself and director of design at Frederick Fisher and Partners in Los Angeles, where he and Mark live part of the year. "There’s a tendency that, with whatever you create, it has to stand still and never age."
That’s not the house they’ve built on a little footprint of 32 feet by 32 feet, along with a small studio for Mark, an artist, just a few steps away. Their single-story home, unassuming in the earthy black asphalt of its shingle exterior and its plan of four equal-size rooms that form a continuous loop, is a monument to dynamism, contingency, and transience. Here, the couple explain how they created a house that, in David’s words, is "forever moving."
See the full story on Dwell.com: Construction Diary: At Sea Ranch, a Couple Build a "Forever Moving" Home Made to Change With Them
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