1971, Northern California, House
37711 Breaker Reach, Sea Ranch
Charles Moore and Dimitri Vedensky
No comment (Gebhard, Winter, and Sandweiss 1985: 390).
1980, North Bay, Licht house
Mill Valley
Charles Moore
They [the Lichts] bought a one-half acre corner lot in Marin County on a road winding up to Mt. Tamalpais. A dozen or so scrub oaks and four great pine trees studded the sloping site.
They chose Charles Moore as their architect because as Miriam Licht put it, "We had read his books; we liked his outlook, and, although the one Moore house we saw did not suit us, it perfectly suited its client."
Moore and his clients worked through cardboard models, cutting them up this way and that, to reach a consensus about the design of the house. Although the Lichts did not necessarily want a recapitulation of their Cliff May house, they did want a modern farm house. For his part, Moore envisioned fusing influences from the southern and northern parts of the state through an architectural recall of William W. Wurster's early houses. He particularly favored the Gregory farm house, discussed in previous chapters. A May-Wurster-Moore house also seemed a fitting use of his own experience designing houses in both locales during his peripatetic career.
One of the study models was a two-part farmhouse connected by a stepped hall 32' long, 20' high and 8' wide. At each end were two large dormer windows. The south-facing one framed a large Monterey pine. A subsequent meeting involved further changes made by slicing up the model again. The Lichts worked out small scale needs and desires with Nicolas Pyle, Moore's associate in the office who managed the project. They found a young Danish contractor, Steen Moller, whose command of craftsmanship made the most of the materials.
Beyond a white grapestake gate and fence, the entrance court is framed by the downhill garage and workshop wing of the house, the upward slope of the hill opposite it, and the wall with the main entrance. A covered walkway, or exterior corredor, begins at the garage, runs past the kitchen door, and turns the corner to continue for two more bays, one of which has a sunken garden court. The last bay straddles a wooden bridge to the door. Inside, the stair landing affords an opportunity to sense the plan of the house from the midpoint of the north-south axis. To the north a short flight of steps leads up to the bedroom wing; to the south the stairs lead down to the living areas of the house. Trees and sky are framed in the tall dormer windows at each end. The upper wing has a tree house quality: the lower level spaces are joined by a few steps. Two sitting rooms, both small, occupy the southwest corner of the house. The lowest has one wall with shelves and another with glass doors opening into the green house; it recalls the formal parlor with its showcase of household treasures, most of them ceramics by Miriam Licht. Up a few steps and offset from this space is a second, less formal sitting area, more like an inglenook, with a built-in couch and a fireplace. The lower landing of the corredor leads, through glass doors, to the generous deck raised above the downward slope of the site and pierced by the trunks of oak trees which partially shade it. Separated by a largely glass wall, deck and kitchen have a pleasant reciprocity. With a backdrop of resawn wooden cabinets painted white to reflect light from the skylights above, the kitchen is, appropriately, the main stage of this modern farmhouse.
The house fits so comfortably into the ranch tradition that the hand of its designer is scarcely noticeable. Elements such as the cut-out arches in the court and the vertical accent of the stair hall reveal that this is a Moore and not a May or Wurster creation. But the main effect is one of synthesis. What in the 1950s would have been a one-floor H-plan has become a subtle split-level design incorporating traditional elements of both the mid-19th and the mid-20th century ranch house (Woodbridge 1988: 322-25).
