Not all client couples have the same vision for their dream house, and it often falls to the architect to creatively reconcile those competing desires. It’s a common enough scenario, but perhaps not to the extent of this San Francisco-based couple with two daughters. S^A | Schwartz and Architecture met with them after they bought a challenging lot in California’s wine country. With its steep, rocky slope across nearly 3 acres, it wasn’t intuitively obvious where to put the house. Further complicating matters, the husband wanted a multistory structure set high above the ground with views to Sonoma Mountain, while the wife envisioned a single-story house that hugged the land. He wanted a formal lawn and, almost whimsically, a pool that he could jump into from the house, while she wanted meandering paths through a garden.
Christopher Baile and Neal Schwartz, FAIA, finessed a high-low solution that seems to work for everyone. “The only place you could have both experiences was at the upper corner of the site,” Neal says, “which was the only point high enough to stand on the ground and see the view. We keyed the house to that natural point, but if you strung a line horizontally across the lot, the house would be floating up in the air, like having a two-story house, because the land sloped away dramatically.” It rests on almost 200 piers dug deep into the rocky soil.
On approach, the first thing you notice is a wedge-shaped, planted mound inset with abstracted stairs. They lead to an entry at the crack between two volumes. The three-bedroom bar on the left runs roughly north-south, while the perpendicular living wing on the right extends to the rear, opening at ground level to a pool garden. This wing offsets the footprint’s rigid geometry. It bends slightly north toward the front, where the dining and family room, office, and a fourth bedroom sit atop the garage.
“Because you’re approaching the house from the lower entry road, it looks like a one-story house sitting on the ground,” Neal says. “As you approach, you see the land is dropping away and the bedroom wing is floating. A change in perception from farther away to up close was another thing we were interested in.”
That arrangement put the pool at the same level as the main living spaces and bedrooms, where a deck running along the pool’s length does indeed invite the family to dive in. It also allowed the design team to create a natural grotto where the land falls away under the bedroom wing, next to the pool’s retaining wall. “The edge of the pool forms the back of the grotto,” Neal says. “We came up with the idea of a foundation spillway that activates the grotto. Water flows over the pool’s 8-foot-high by 60-foot-long infinity edge. When it’s on, it’s like a huge fountain and contributes to the sound, impacting the quality of the space down there. It doesn’t get a ton of light, but on a hot Sonoma day it’s incredibly cool, and the gap between the pool and curving underbelly of the house pulls air through.”
Behind the house, the land slopes up into the ridges of the valley, and the roof shapes reference the hills beyond. The triangulated forms also relate to the rip rap rockscapes that were incorporated into the design. Rocks excavated from drilling the piers were used to create sloping surfaces that act as retaining walls. In the grotto under the bedroom wing, the rock formations rise up and embed the cruciform columns, as if the columns were emerging from the earth. “There was a lot of thought about how to make that a viable place, so it didn’t feel like you were just under the house,” Neal says. “Rather than a field of columns, its support depends on the two cruciform columns, tapered from the base to be more elegant. A little light at the top casts a glow down on them at night.”
Inside Angle
Those angular lines continue into most interior spaces, as did the architects’ efforts to reconcile the clients’ competing preferences. The wife, of South African background, loves bold colors, while the husband, whose family came from Iran, prioritized black and gray. At the entrance, a diamond-shaped monitor with a chartreuse-colored interior drops down from a skylight. Directly below is a “geode garden” that separates the kitchen and dining room. As Neal explains, “The husband had a collection of geodes, and I think he thought I’d hate the idea that the house was filled with them. He started to tease me about it, so I doubled down and said go for it. His love of geodes inspired the skylight and the geode planter underneath it.” That feature led to the creation of a second skylight above the freestanding divider between the dining table and living room. Earthquake-proofed with a mini moment frame, it contains a double-sided fireplace within a bar and media cabinet that rises into the skylight, essentially flipping the design of its counterpart.
This project pushed the architects in directions they wouldn’t normally go. “Most of our work tends toward a warmer palette of soft, natural wood,” Neal says. “In this case, the husband didn’t like any warmth in the wood. We had to beat the warmth out of the floor and cabinetry, which put us in a black-gray palette. The wife was super into really bold pops of color such as chartreuse and bright blue. We tried to lean into that and recognize that the palette would be more contrasty than is typical for us.” Christopher adds: “The walnut kitchen cabinetry was the only material that could go fully black. And we had to do many mockups to get the white oak floor this gray.”
A black-stained walnut stairway descends from the kitchen to the garage. Two stones with similar veining were used in the kitchen—a black slab for the black part of the kitchen, and a white-gray stone to complement the lighter-toned wood at the island and elsewhere in the house. The wall above the countertop window is waterproof Venetian plaster, which also occurs in the primary bath.
The firm also designed the dining table. Its mirrored chrome legs, which the couple requested, took the shape of the bedroom wing’s cruciform columns. They are detailed to reveal pieces of metal that lighten up the heavy wood slab. Custom wallpaper in a vibrant, deep-sea blue makes an appearance in the powder room. In this windowless interior space, a skylight at the top of the high ceiling and a wall angle that echoes the roof geometry lend a sense of drama. But the home’s one anomaly is a circular terrarium window in the hallway between the two kids’ bedrooms. “The husband announced there had to be a circle window because he thought I hated circle windows,” Neal says. “It was another case where we were like, OK, let’s put one here and make a planter out of it. A lot of the quirky elements started out through this rapport we had with the clients trying to push us and our buttons, and us embracing it as it made sense with the house.”
Rhythm Section
Thin and tailored, the house’s silhouette received equally stringent detailing. The challenge, of course, was to create highly custom effects that weren’t overly difficult to construct. To meet Sonoma’s wildfire code, the architects used 6-inch-wide western red cedar siding, routing the boards to create an irregular rhythm. “We had the contractor rout into them to make each board look like three boards, with two smaller and one bigger,” says Christopher. “It also relates to the screens where we have wood fins and metal in between, creating a rhythm as you move across the façade.” Soffits are stained black “to make the roof shape feel like a volume. The black, standing-seam metal roof hides the gutters, angling along the top and bottom like a cap.”
Those tapered fins were meticulously engineered to provide screening for the bedrooms. Based on a study of views in and out, every fin is set at a different angle to create privacy or let in the long view and integrated with the guardrail along the front façade. Given the number of variations, the team developed a system that the contractor could easily install. They took a no-waste approach, basing the fins’ height on the height of available cedar boards. Diagonal cuts yielded two fins per board. These were bolted into a structural metal shelf set on top of the 42-inch-tall guardrail and along the porch ceiling, with tabs that correspond to each angle. Where the fins occur, every third rung of the guardrail was dropped out so they could continue to the floor. And strip lights embedded in the porch ceiling illuminate each group of fins.
Stucco-clad foundation walls have a subtle texture created with a custom rake. “We wanted grooves ¼-inch deep and ⅛-inch wide,” Christopher says. “The lines are not perfectly straight, and you can feel it’s been worked on by hand.”
For builder Ronan Hanley, the grotto’s curved ceiling was his proudest piece of construction. Its smooth stucco coating brings softness and light to the grotto. “It was phenomenally difficult to build,” he says. “About 80 feet long and 35 feet wide, the ceiling had to come up and align with the gutters within 1⁄16th of an inch, perfectly flush like you see baseboard against a floor. And we had to do it 15 feet in the air with the different subs—gutter installers, roofers, framers, electricians—lighting runs along it—and plumbers for the sprinklers installed in the ceiling. But it looks amazing.”
The house uses energy sparingly, thanks to its full off-grid capabilities, including solar panels, an on-site well and septic system, and a graywater catchment system for irrigation. In addition to radiant floors, passive design strategies help to warm and cool the house naturally.
For the design team, the project was an exercise in embracing opposable ideas. “It got us thinking about paradoxes,” Christopher says. “For me it meant that we don’t have to be this or that. Maybe these two things together can be something better.” For their part, the clients love the way the house lights up at night and feels a bit like a resort, Christopher says. And they do jump into the pool from their bedrooms. “They live in a condo on a high floor in San Francisco,” he says. “This is really different—their way of connecting to the outside.”
Rocks excavated for the piers were used to stabilize the ramp from driveway to front door. Living spaces open on grade at the rear.
A sculptural skylight with a chartreuse-painted interior helped satisfy the wife’s love of bold colors, while black accents and grayed-out white oak millwork played to the husband’s penchant for black and gray.
The primary suite occupies the far end of the bedroom wing and incorporates a pocket garden. Vertical fins, precisely angled and executed, create privacy or admit views in and out of the bedrooms and create a rhythm on the façades.
The family frequently uses the deck outside the bedroom wing as a diving board for the pool.
In the grotto under the bedrooms, water flowing over the pool’s infinity edge becomes a cooling feature.
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Paradox House
Sonoma, California
Architect: Principal in charge: Neal Schwartz, FAIA; project architect: Christopher Baile, S^A | Schwartz and Architecture, San Francisco
Builder: Ronan Hanley, DKG Construction, Novato, California
Interior design: S^A | Schwartz and Architecture
Landscape architect: Kara Stickley, Arterra Landscape Architects, San Francisco
Structural engineer: Stan M. Wu, SMW & Associates, Oakland, California
Project size: 4,500 square feet
Site size: 2.51 acres
Construction cost: Withheld
Photography: Bruce Damonte Photography
Key Products
Cooktop/vent hood: Thermador
Cladding: Western red cedar
Decking: Ipe
Dishwasher: Thermador
Entry doors: Fleetwood Windows and Doors
Fireplace: Ortel
Flooring: Amber Flooring
Garage doors: Hormann
Lighting control system: Lutron
Millwork/moulding/trim: Millwork Management (custom)
Outdoor built-in grill: Artisan Grills
Ovens: Thermador
Refrigerator: Thermador
Roofing: Metal Sales
Vanities: Millwork Management (custom)
Washer/dryer: Whirlpool
Window shading system: Hunter Douglas
Window wall systems: Fleetwood Windows and Doors
Windows: Fleetwood Windows and Doors
Wine refrigerator: Thermador
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