“It is possible at once to lose and to find yourself” at California’s Sea Ranch, said Patricia Leigh Brown in The New York Times. This 10-mile-long “utopia by the sea,” two and a half hours north of San Francisco, is an “unspoiled swath of California coast” that just happens to be home to some of the most iconic houses in America. Though getting there requires threading the needle of a “stomach-churning, acrophobia-inducing sliver of Highway 1,” the destination itself is a balm. In the early 1960s, a coterie of “A-list” architects—including Charles W. Moore, William Turnbull, Donlyn Lyndon, Joseph Esherick, and Richard Whitaker—followed the wind to California. Observing the way “its salty gusts sculpted the cypress trees,” the visionaries conceived a style that “poetically echoed” its force.
No home reflects that environmental aesthetic more than Moore’s Condominium One, “an austere, Shaker-like ode to nature’s power” that’s unassuming on the outside and spectacular on the inside. An expression of Moore’s “infinite capacity for joy,” the home is a wondrous “indoor fairy tale” with papier-mâché ponies, a winged cow, and a four-poster bedroom loft held up by logs. “Daydreaming is the emotional agenda” at Sea Ranch, and that’s the mood captured in Obie Bowman’s Walk-in Cabins, a “remote gathering of 15 troll-like dwellings in a kingdom of redwoods,” reachable only by foot. While Condominium One disappears into the rugged coastal bluffs, the Walk-ins “settle into the landscape, like quail nesting.”
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