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DÉJÀ VU
A HOUSE DESTROYED IN THE MAYACAMAS FOOTHILLS WILL RISE AGAIN.
BY ZAHID SARDAR PHOTOGRAPHS BY MATTHEW MILLMAN
The Glen Ellen house that the San Francisco firm Aidlin Darling Design created for its clients in 2016 is now sadly gone but the plan is to rebuild it as it appeared in these images
78 WINTER/SPRING 2019 taken before the fie. SPACES
“WE SHED A LOT OF TEARS along with our clients,” architect Joshua Aidlin of the San Francisco firmAidlin Darling Design says.
Less than a year after it was completed in 2016, the 3,100-square-foot weekend home the firmdesigned for David Rice and his partner, Barry Mehew, was consumed by wildfies. Set on a hillside near Glen Ellen, the home had taken “four years to design and build,” project architect Cherie Lau recalls with a sigh.
But Rice, who heads the San Francisco tech startup behind Life360 — an app that connects family members during a crisis — reassured everyone involved that, unlike others less fortunate, they could and would rebuild. And, gratifyingly for the designers, he and Mehew wanted precisely the same house again.
Rice grew up in San Jose but has lived in Europe, Asia and other parts of the United States; he met Mehew, a financialconsultant from London, on vacation 18 years ago in Cape Town. Living in England, as well as their experiences around the globe, helped hone their taste for the kind of spare, international-style environment that Aidlin and Lau created for them.
During the last 18 years the couple has tried to incorporate a similar modern sensibility into their four-story Victorian home in San Francisco with some success, but “we were always limited by its physical footprint,” Rice says. “In the country, without such constraints we had exactly what we wanted.”
A winding dirt road cuts across their 26-acre property up to the ridge where their single-story getaway home once commanded panoramic views of Sonoma Valley to the west.
Thestructure consists of two small standing-seam zinc-clad volumes, set slightly apart on the hill in a north-south axis and linked by a long glazed box of a floatingbridge held aloft on slender steel pilotis (piers). Modular, practical, with no two-story glass spaces, the relatively low-budget design had the playful quality of “a garden pavilion that embraced the outdoors,” Aidlin says.
The glazed bridge contained south-facing living and dining areas with modern furnishings, a library in the middle, and the north-facing master suite; retractable glass doors at each end opened to spacious decks shaded by flat, cantilevered, heat-reflecting albedo roofs. The tubular bridge had openings at each end providing cross-ventilation; its cedar wood-clad ceilings and distressed oak floorscontrasted pleasingly with the sleeker interiors of the zinc-clad sections north and south. Thenorth structure, with concrete floors and white-painted walls, had two guest rooms, and the south one had a galley kitchen with retractable Fleetwood aluminum doors opening onto a deck and a swimming pool.
Two zinc-clad sections of the house were sunk into the earth. The rest, a glass and wood “bridge” that contained living and dining spaces as well as the master suite, was attached in the rear, held aloft above the sloping hillside on delicate steel columns or pilotis. The concrete entry courtyard gave way to a boardwalk sheltered by a cantilevered canopy. The living spaces had west-facing glass walls with views. Their wood-clad ceilings added warmth, and their modernist furnishings were enhanced with custom details such as the steel mantel for the fieplace.
The floting roof above the “bridge” section of the house was cantilevered outward over decks on the north and south sides to provide shade for outdoor dining and seating. In one of the zinc-clad boxes, Aidlin Darling designed a kitchen that also opened to the swimming pool, which survived the fie. The pool is visible in the mirrored backsplash, opposite.
“As soon as you arrived in the concrete courtyard on the east side and entered through the front door, you were on a rusticated wood floo,” Aidlin adds. “You saw, felt and perhaps even smelled the difference.”
Pine trees planted by Boy Scouts to reforest the west hill slope after a similar fie during the ’60s made the building seem like a treehouse, but the trees only added to the intensity of the blaze that took nearly everything in its path, leaving behind a moonscape of white ash.
“We were in the city when the security system sent us an alert at 1 a.m. that our country house was dying. The last signal said that the propane tank was empty,” Rice recalls.
Only the pool, deck and built-ins at the south end of the building survived, along with the hedges and car court. “It is surreal,” Lau says. “One part of the site where the swath of fie did not cut through is still lush.” Th intact sections will be reintegrated when the property takes shape again.
Thestructure will cost exponentially more to build this time around, in part due to more stringent building and fire codes, but even those are unlikely to prevent such a tragedy from ever happening again. “Nothing, not even a concrete house, could have survived in such a situation, because windows are always the weakest line of defense,” Aidlin explains.
Thelow-maintenance zinc cladding, which created the visual illusion of fie resistance, also could not withstand the force of the fie, which grabbed extra fuel — patches of dry wild grass — as it advanced up the hill.
“Only buildings on heavily watered lots survived,” Aidlin says. “Soaked vegetation prevented the fie from reaching some houses. But lawns are not ecologically smart, and a wide clearing as a fie barrier is not attractive either.”
For now, the danger is past, because Rice and Mehew’s woods are gone and it will be decades before less fire-prone native manzanitas, oaks and madrones they have replanted will mature.
Still, the site is beautiful.
“The silver lining is that without the trees the view is even more spectacular,” Lau says.
Theonly hurdle to overcome right now is cost, and to reduce that would mean compromising on the custom details, built-in cabinetry and materials that gave the spectacular, glowing structure its identity. “Yes, it could be rebuilt with stucco and plasterboard,” Aidlin says. “But that just wouldn’t feel the same.” n
Opposite: Steel framing outlines the extent of the master bedroom, which is literally and visually extended beyond its boundaries because of the materials that were used. For instance, cedar wood ceilings flwed in unbroken lines from inside to outside as did wood floors. he master bath had a deep tub to sit in and take in the views. The glass-walled shower also looked across the valley below. This page: The floting bedroom felt like a treehouse. By contrast, the guest rooms in the second zinc-clad section of the home were more enclosed.
