From the Archive: A Graphic Designer Traded Loft Living for This Sausalito Mountain Cabin

Welcome to From the Archive, a look back at stories from Dwell’s past. This story previously appeared in the August 2001 issue.

Every couple of decades, 46-year-old graphic designer Tom Bonauro migrates a little further north.

In the late 197os, he fled the suburban embrace of Silicon Valley’s Sunnyvale for the cooler climes of San Francisco’s art and club scene, to "plug into pop culture" and make his professional mark. Known for iconoclastic print and video work for clients such as Swatch, Voice Farm, Margaret Jenkins, Gus Van Sant, MTV, Todd Oldham, and SFMoMA, Bonauro’s dreamy pieces feature hyperevocative images—many culled from his own voluminous collection of artifacts and photographs. His moody "501 Reasons" campaign for Levi’s best-loved product splashed out-of-focus marbles, spirographs, tornadoes, DNA molecules, and more (everything but the jeans themselves) across America’s bus shelters and billboards.

After the usual series of studio apartments, Bonauro landed a raw live/work loft rental in 1989 in sunny Potrero Hill, a once-industrial frontier favored by artists and other noncorporate types that, in the course of a decade, morphed into a dot-com spawning ground. As stories about displaced artists became front-page news, Bonauro’s biological clock started ticking ever more urgently for a home of his own. "I had done the whole underground thing, gone to the clubs, been part of the scene. The city was changing all around me, especially outside my front door. After 20 years, it was time to leave and find someplace more private and personal to call home."

By the end of the millennium, Bonauro’s name was on the title of a two-level, mid-’5os California bungalow located just across the Golden Gate Bridge in the cool green hills of Sausalito. "Suddenly I went from living in a box within a larger box in the city to this very intimate mountain cabin in a town that I never would have imagined living in." A bayside village and former artists’ colony (pop. 7,835) that now boasts some of the area’s most expensive real estate, Sausalito is also a magnet for tourists, who mostly mill around the cluster of New Age-y galleries and T-shirt shops by the water.

"Things have always had a way of just falling into place for me," says Bonauro in his best Zen delivery, when explaining how he happened to buy a bucolic dream home while the rest of the Bay Area was bloody from the raging real-estate bidding wars. As it happens, his second northward migration had been set in motion years before.

Among the creative players that the designer had clicked with in San Francisco were John Randolph and Bruce Tomb, founders of the edgy Interim Office of Architecture (IOOA), who invited Bonauro to Sausalito in 1987 to view their house remodel for fine-arts photographer Lewis Baltz. Bonauro promptly commissioned the pair to design his loft, and a 1994 Elle Decor article on IOOA featured both Baltz’s house and Bonauro’s space.

"Then, when IOOA split up a few years ago, Lewis, who lives in Paris, offered John the upstairs [of his house] to use as an office," Bonauro explains. "On a whim I asked if Lewis planned to sell, because I could really imagine living in this space. It feels so protected. We gradually worked it out, and now John and I share my office space in the city."

While the prospect of not living on top of people was seductive, the move was somewhat traumatic for Bonauro, who curates his possessions—from religious reliquaries to antique shoe forms and amulets—and arranges his environment with uncommon rigor. "Basically, I approached moving as if it were another creative project. It gave me a chance to edit and refine my collection. And I had to figure out how to take things I had custom-designed for one space and adapt them to this new context.

"Because IOOA had done the remodel, it wasn’t like going to a totally strange place, which was comforting. I brought the pieces they had made for me, and there was furniture—a table, benches, a couch—they had designed for Lewis." Having already lowered walls about a foot from the ceiling and cut in skylights, Randolph continued to subtract and refine once Bonauro moved in. "Doors are ugly and they take up too much space—I like softer closures," says Bonauro, who had them replaced with either fabric or sliding panels—frosted glass in the bathroom, metallic mesh at the threshold to the living room. And then there were the half-dozen sculptural cabinets by his friend, furniture designer and builder Philip Agee, that Bonauro had commissioned over the years.

Amazingly, everything slid into place, albeit with a different aspect. "Where the loft was one big sensation—dominated by work—this house is more a collection of intimate encounters, so I let that be my guide. In the living room Philip’s pieces are placed so as to imply zones within the same room. Extending out from the walls rather than sitting flush, they create nooks and areas of privacy."

As you approach the house, it’s easy to see why Bonauro was attracted to its cloistered quality; from the street you could easily miss it altogether. "With its inward-looking aspect, it’s perfect for someone who wants to be insulated from the distractions of the outside world," observes Randolph.

The first line of defense is a wooden fence and gate, a structure backed with stands of pine trees and other foliage. Ringing the bell, you feel like a novitiate awaiting admittance to some holy retreat. A bridge takes you to the front door; on the left, a plasterwork deer transplanted from the loft looks down from a hill. To the right is a deck and hot tub (this is Marin County, after all), which Bonauro has yet to stoke.