2004 Custom Home Design Awards

Custom Home, Sept-Oct, 2004 by Meghan Drueding, Leslie Ensor, Shelley D. Hutchins, Bruce D. Snider

Entrant/Architect: Dick Clark Architecture, Austin, Texas; Builder: Bill Dorman Construction, Austin; Living space: 4,920 square feet; Site: 1 acre; Construction cost: Withheld; Photographer: [c] Paul Bardagjy. * For product information see page 158.

Custom Home 3,000 to 5,000 Square Feet Stinson Beach, Calif., Residence

The laid-back demeanor of Sea Drift, a sleepy beach community just north of San Francisco, can be deceiving. Because of its precarious location atop the San Andreas Fault and along the rough Pacific Coast, each new house there works hard to satisfy a myriad of safety and building codes. FEMA regulations require homes to be lifted several feet off the ground in case of flooding; paradoxically, the local homeowners' association enforces a strict height limit. Foundations and framing must also meet strict earthquake standards.

But architect Rodney Friedman loves a challenge, and he certainly faced one in designing this home. Steel helix piers anchor it to a concrete slab foundation buried under the sand, while steel columns elevate the ground floor nine feet above the sand. Inside the house, Friedman didn't have much room to maneuver, considering the clients' need to accommodate four generations. "At Sea Drift you can't have a two-story house, so there was a 9- to 10-foot envelope between the floor and the roof to design in," he says. "You can do pop-up roofs, so we did a barrel vault over the living and dining rooms and the study."

Keeping the home's oceanfront site in mind, he graced its wide-open public areas with subtle evocations of the seafaring life. Exposed, structural ceiling rods are made from stainless steel yacht rigging, and laminated cedar column covers resemble ships' masts. "I wanted the clients to feel like they were in an oceangoing schooner," he says.--M.D.

Entrant/Architect: Fisher-Friedman Associates, Emeryville, Calif.; Builder: R.J. Anstey Construction, San Anselmo, Calif.; Landscape architect: OMG, Berkeley, Calif.; Living space: 3,500 square feet; Site size: 0.6 acre; Construction cost: $400 a square foot; Photographer: JD Peterson. * For product information see page 158.

Custom Home More Than 5,000 Square Feet Bethesda, Md., Residence

The jury commended architect David Jameson's ability to fuse the traditional style of the neighborhood with his clients' wishes for a more modern aesthetic. They said that "it didn't have an overly ostentatious quality" that is the downfall of so many big houses. "That's the whole idea of the project," says Jameson of the judges' comments. "We took the program of a really big house and fused it into something clean and simple."

The home's corner lot location was useful to that end. The entry facade lines up with other large and stately homes but takes on a quieter, more private tone as it turns the corner. For what he terms its "monumental facade," Jameson speced traditional materials like slate and stone, but modernized them by eliminating mortar joints and transitions between elements. A limestone brise-soleil shades expansive glazing on this southern exposure and mitigates the home's oversized scale. The limestone picks up again on the private side of the house to set up an unapologetic contemporary rear elevation that adds glass, steel, and stucco to the white stone backdrop.