I am not sure how many moons ago it was that I fell in love with the stair case from this house but I have spent hours dreaming about the beautiful house that it would belong too, and imagining myself there........Finally I have found the house and it is just as spectacular as i had hoped it would be, sadly the architect and his family still live there so I doubt I will be moving in.
This beautiful property in the wonderfully named town 'Rough and Ready', California is home to architect Ken Meffan and took 10 years to build....
This was a really difficult site to build on, because there’s so much
water. A creek runs through it, and there are springs all over the
place. But we love the water, and so do the kids. They dam the creek up
every summer for swimming, and it collects silt in the winter, which
makes great compost for the garden. Last year, we grew sunflowers that
must have been 12 feet tall.
There are two structures on the property: the little workshop, where
we lived for almost ten years, and the main house. Before the workshop,
we lived in a tent. We were very poor, but we were having an adventure,
like the Swiss Family Robinson—–until a giant, once-every-20-years
rainstorm pretty much blew us away. The morning after the storm was
over, the kids came to me and said, “Dad, this isn’t so much fun
anymore.”
We only had two of the four kids when I started building the main
house, and as the family grew, we kept adding bedrooms. Officially, it’s
3,400 square feet, but half of that is a greenhouse. When I was a young
architect in Malibu, I hired a landscaper who took me to a greenhouse
tucked back in one of the canyons. It was crammed full of plants, and
when we squeezed down one aisle, he said, “Just take a deep breath.” And
when I breathed that pure, oxygen-fortified air, I knew that I wanted
to build a house just like that.
Regular houses are full of barriers. Even windows are psychological
barriers. Here, we slide open the walls and live in direct contact with
nature. You can feel the weather in here. I was on a business call once
when it was raining; it was this tremendous downpour, where the sky just
opened up, and I couldn’t hear or talk. That’s what this house is all
about.
Living with wildlife is also important. We get lizards inside and
don’t bother to run them out. We’ve had wild turkeys wander in, and a
baby squirrel used to sleep with the kids. We have tons of people here
all the time, too. I’ve stopped noticing when there’s an extra kid or
two in the house.
I consider this house a prototype. Some of its features I wouldn’t
dare build for customers, in case they don’t work out. Like the
garage-door “sunroof” in our bedroom, or the sliding glass walls. When I
build those walls for customers, I buy cool, superexpensive hardware
from Germany, with big lever handles. Here, I tried something different,
putting them on Rollerblade wheels. They worked out wonderfully,
though! The flip side of experimenting is that the inspection process
can be a real drag. I had to get a rural occupancy permit for us to live
out here. And I had to block off the spot where the fireman’s pole was
supposed to go.
For the walls, my theory was “anything but drywall.” The walls on the
ground floor are straw bales, covered with clay mud dug from the site.
And a lot of the wood upstairs is salvaged. When I build big vacation
houses for other people, we usually clear a bunch of trees on the
location and mill them into lumber onsite.And then when the job is over,
I just drag home whatever’s left and use it around here.
There’s corrugated polycarbonate on the roof of the greenhouse and
corrugated galvanized siding out on the workshop. I consider it an
indigenous material. In nearby gold-mining towns like Grass Valley and
Nevada City, the forty-niners used corrugated metal extensively,
probably because it was a cheap material. They built a lot of Victorian
houses, too, but those don’t stimulate me as much as an old barn does,
or an old mine building. If you make a building too perfect, it doesn’t
give you that interesting feel. You don’t want your house to feel like a
modern furniture store.
I grew up in suburbia, in Redondo Beach, California, and I think our
environment here is a rebellion against that. Once, I wondered if the
kids might be better off somewhere else, so I asked them what they
thought about living here. They said, “Are you kidding, Dad? We love it
here.” They don’t know anything different, of course. But they will. My
20-year-old daughter lives down in San Luis Obispo now, and she thought
it was so great to have her own apartment. But after two weeks of
sitting in that drywall box, she started to appreciate what she had up
here in Rough and Ready. We’re pretty good with weird around here. It’s a
little on the funky side, but it’s home.
