1989-1990 Western Home Awards - includes 20 winners in this year's biennial program

Sunset, Oct, 1989

What does a house mean? To some, simple shelter-a place to stay warm and dry and to park possessions. But for others, the kind of house they live in is as important to their overall well-being as the food they eat or the air they breathe. A good house can give its occupants pleasure every day, and it affects all who enter it.

Through the biennial Western Home Awards competition, Sunset Magazine and the American Institute of Architects have for 33 years sought to recognize the very best in Western residential architecture. Every other October, we present the winning designs to our readers. This time, 20 houses received recognition: 1 Honor Award, 8 Awards of Merit, 9 Citations, and 2 Special Awards.

As with food or drink, what suits one taste will not always please another; there is no one right way to design a house. Indeed, as this year's winners illustrate, ways to create a special kind of house can be very diverse. And not surprisingly, few winners had the unanimous support of our sevenmember jury.

We don't expect you to love every house you see on the following pages, but we do think each winner offers important lessons. Individually, they are custom solutions for particular situations. Together, they form a wide-ranging collection-a cutting-edge architectural portfolio.

The 20 winners represent different kinds of buildings from different parts of the West. They include big houses and small ones, friendly country cabins and sculpted urban residences. What, then, do they have in commonand what made them rise above the other 300 or so entries in our 1989-90 awards program?

Each winner successfully addresses questions of climate, site, context, and floor plan-as well as meeting specific challenges posed by the clients. In each house, a consistency in materials and design approach gives the whole building a pleasing balance and rhythm. In addition, each has that special magic that evokes an emotional response.

In the end, all the award winners have qualities that happen to start with the letter R; these 20 projects are at once rigorous, respectful, and refined. They are houses that make their owners rejoice to inhabit them.

Honor Award / Tanner Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects, San Francisco, for Kathleen and David Martin

The jury looked for originality, disciplined use of forms and materials, and a sympathetic relationship between a design and its context. It found all this in one very specialized commission the conversion of an old cabinet shop into a modern residence and gave it the only Honor Award of the 1989-90 program.

This project offers useful lessons about gaining daylight, retaining privacy, and respecting existing architectural features. The owners, a painter and her husband, wanted to move from the suburbs to the heart of the city. The cabinet shop had two irresistible attractions: proximity to urban amenities, and space that could accommodate large-scale art,

After gutting the building, the architect used its structural signature three big bowstring trusses as built-in sculpture, exposing them where possible over the newly inserted suite of rooms.

At the center of the house, a roofless courtyard opens to the main living areas toward the front and to the house-width studio at the rear, flooding each room with light.

Award of Merit / Jones Studio, Inc., Phoenix, for Cella and Mike Halas

As flamboyant as its facade may look, this house is both practical and in pleasing harmony with the life style of its owners. With their children grown, the clients wanted living space that could be left wide open for day-to-day living or partitioned to accommodate occasional visitors. To the left of the entry lie an office and adjoining bath that can be used as guest quarters; beyond that is a garage with shop. To the right is the vaulted living room, with the kitchen and a screened porch behind it. Past the dining area are the master bedroom, bath, and study. Sliding doors can separate study and bath, or close off the entire wing.

The roof's arches repeat the forms of nearby mountains and boulders. Copper cladding, natural wood, rough brick, tile, and burnt red paint on steel also echo the colors and textures of the desert setting.

CITATION / Richard K. Rhodes Architects, Salinas, California, for Palma Grove Homes, Markham Ranch Finding fresh ideas in merchant-built tract housing has proved a difficult task in recent years, But in this round of the Western Home Awards program, the jury commended several houses in a 642-acre development halfway between Salinas and Monterey. The acreage was originally ranch land (called the "pastures of heaven" by John Steinbeck). To minimize intrusion on the landscape, the development clusters 102 detached houses in the wooded flats, with 43 secluded sites (ranging in size ftom 3 to 60 acres) across the upper meadows.

Now in its first phase of development, this project was singled out not so much for design innovation as for sensitive siting and appropriate styling. Borrowing ftom Monterey's established architectural vernacular-the adobe and ranch stylesthese houses seem already at home within the midcoastal California oaks. In fact, one of the six models offered is a near clone of the historic whaling station near Monterey's Fisherman's Wharf.