Out of the ashes: rebuilding the Oakland and Berkeley Hills - California

Sunset, Sept, 1994 by Daniel Gregory

After upheaval, a measure of serenity

Every house tells a different story, but here in the burned area, each tale begins the same way: as a nightmare of destruction. Frances Dinkelspiel and her husband, Gary Wayne, were eating a celebratory brunch in San Francisco--she had just discovered she was pregnant with their first child--when the fire broke out. Dinkelspiel, who is a newspaper reporter, recalls the loss of her house an tabby cat: "We raced back to the East Bay as soon as we saw the huge black cloud, but didn't make it back in time to rescue Mookie or any of our things." The fire stopped just beyond their lot.

The Friday after the fire, "so sure we were of rebuilding," they hired Emeryville, California, architects Henry Siegel and Larry Strain. There were doubts, especially late at night when they realized that rebuilding would put their lives on hold for a long time, but they proceeded nevertheless.

Their new home is a big change from what they had before, though it follows the original house's placement on the steep downhill site. The previous house had suffered from several major drawbacks: vertiginous 30-foot-high decks, no relationship to the ground, every room an odd shape, and poor integration between floors.

Siegel and Strain's design combines the best features of tower and terrace: it opens toward the view and digs into the slope at the same time. You descend a stairway past the separate garage to a small terraced courtyard. The front door is under a portico off a small patch of lawn carved out of the hill. The house feels anchored to its site, and there is room for outdoor play, suddenly more important with a child in the family.

Though the architects kept to the earlier house's oddly angled grid, they managed to keep the major living spaces rectangular, and emphasized the link between the three floors (three bedrooms on top, living areas on second level, bedroom and playroom below) by designing an open stair hall that doubles as a light well. The big living room, oriented northwest toward a beautiful ridge that did not burn, forms the heart of the main floor and opens to a deck and small terrace. Three steps above the living room, and overlooking it like balcony boxes in a theater, are the kitchen, dining area, and office-library. These spaces open directly to the living room and share its great view. From th kitchen, that view is most vividly framed by a rectangular cutout at counter height. By using changes in level instead of view-blocking walls, the architect made each room feel well defined and open at the same time.

Were all the insurance and building hassles worth it? Says Dinkelspiel, "Yes an no. It's wonderful to be in the house--my house means more to me now, which has everything to do with building the house yourself. If I could choose, of course I would choose not to have had the fire. But the point is the feeling of place--you invest so much in a home that when it's done it's part of you."

Reaching toward the future

People react to disaster in different ways. Leslie Becker, a graphic designer who lost everything, decided to rebuild without looking back. "I think it's ver important that this house be different from what I had before," she says. She calls the fire "a bold event in my life, a turning point," and she saw no purpose in trying to regain what had been totally erased. She thought about trying to design it herself "for about 30 seconds," but then gave the job to Sa Francisco architect Jim Jennings, whose work she admired. She handed Jennings a simple list of functional requirements--a separate area for her adult children, protected outdoor space, and good views without loss of privacy--and waited to see where his imagination would take him.