Wild Imagination
An innovative weekend home in Big Sur designed by architect Anne Fougeron pays honor to sun and sky
Few of the countless photographers focused on the Big Sur coastline
pay much attention to the other side of Highway 1, where only
an occasional dirt road hints that anyone lives back in the hidden
canyons and rough hillsides.
Back there, where rushing creeks replace the rhythmic whispers
of ocean waves and one looks for mountain lions and coyotes
rather than whales and otters, the human footprint is as
invisible as the Big Sur Land Use Plan can make it. Only
a handful of building permits are issued each year, each
with its own tale of a lengthy process.
San Francisco architect Anne Fougeron, AIA, took on a particularly
difficult struggle when she agreed to design a weekend house
for a family that had bought a sliver of canyon land more
than 40 years ago. At that time, their parcel would have
been acceptably large, but standards became stricter over
time and their acreage is smaller than the current requirement.
Nevertheless, even though her husband had died, the widow
wanted to build a house to enjoy with her four grown children
and their children.
The permit process took three and a half years, involving
the usual army of lawyers, facilitators, inspectors, biologists,
archaeologists, and other assorted experts (one of whom
spent the night on the site to make sure it was not home
to the endangered red-legged frog). Finally, about four years
ago, the family received the precious permit to build.
The real triumph, however, is the house itself, an elegant,
imaginative response to a narrow and problematic site,
where the sun drops behind the canyon wall by two in the
afternoon. Typically, canyon residents have opted for cabin-style
dwellings—cozy shelters from the darkness. Fougeron decided that the house
should look upward toward the sun and sky. “The idea is that you always
see the sky, wherever you are in the house,” she explains. “You’re
not constantly looking at the canyon walls.”
Playing with light is Anne Fougeron’s
specialty. She has won numerous awards for her imaginative layering
of different opacities of glass, including in this home, which
won an honor award from The American Institute of Architects,
East Bay, among other distinctions. As Fougeron says, “Transparency
is our middle name.” In Big Sur, she used walls and corners of glass to
create diagonal sight lines so the inhabitants are in constant contact with the
landscape. Although the two bedrooms downstairs aren’t huge, towering two-story
corner windows reveal nearby trees and the canyon wall soaring up to the sky.
From the living room, a glass-roofed extension breaks open the basic rectangular
shape of the house and pushes the interior out into the natural setting.
But the architect didn’t want the occupants to feel as if they were living
in a fishbowl, so her choice of layers of semiopaque materials that allow light
in but blur the view make the structure intimate and livable.
Diffused sunlight pours into the second-floor rooms through
interlocking panels of Profilite, a translucent German industrial
glass that turns the view of the trees and hillsides into
an impressionistic haze of color. The walkway connecting
the upstairs library with a dormitory bedroom is made of
steel and translucent glass, so it seems to float above the
living room.
Along the front of the house, a freestanding wall of Alaskan yellow
cedar slats creates constantly changing patterns of light and dark,
and provides a sense of privacy and protection from the nearby
road. Even the solid materials of the facade—the walls of copper panels and the steel framing—lighten the
visual mass when they shimmer discreetly in the sunshine.
Fougeron, working with structural engineer Paul Endres, created
a swooping roof that seems to hover above the house rather than
rest on it, thanks to an invisible support system of steel columns.
At the base of the house, the same steel columns raise the house
two and a half feet above the ground, a seemingly magical effect
that offers practical protection against dampness. Access to
the front door, a gangplank of polished wood rather than
a solid staircase, adds to the impression of lightness.
For all of its airiness and open-plan design,
the house has areas of
privacy such as the upstairs library and a little sitting area
on the stair landing.“We like being a family,” the homeowner told Fougeron, “but
we always
want some privacy as well. These small spaces give us the sense
of being
together—and not.”
Fougeron added an inglenook, an old-fashioned
touch that could have come out of a traditional Bernard Maybeck
house. The protected
alcove surrounding the fireplace is a natural place of refuge
for conversation, games, and reading, particularly on a cold
night when the wind whistles and the fog rolls into the canyon.
It’s one of the details that makes the house
work as well for one or two people as for the dozen or so
who come for holidays.
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