Owners:  Stefan and Wendy Dyckerhoff
Architect: Douglas Bernham, envelope A+D                               

Homeowner Summary
Built: 2000
Square Footage: 6,000

We moved into our home 4 years ago after being intrigued by an article about the house – and particularly the picture of a little girl riding her tricycle from the garden into the living room.  As soon as we saw the house, we new that indoor/outdoor living was for us - and that the best way to live indoor/outdoor was the ability to make your walls “disappear” by rolling up the big garage doors facing westward.

Another favorite feature of the house for Wendy is that the big walls required sizeable work of arts.  Stefan’s favorite part is the view from the tree house (aka the master bedroom) towards the Santa Cruz Mountains.  The combination of the large windows and the roof which is engineered to hover on top of them allow us to live in this fantastic view.

Our home was originally designed and built for a contractor and his wife who were living in a San Francisco loft.  Within the project, the spatial and material qualities of the San Francisco loft are exported to the suburbs.  The generating idea for the house was the Japanese garden design strategy of shakkei, or borrowed landscape. The section and sitting of the building work to screen the suburban "middle ground", pulling the distant views of the Santa Cruz Mountains into the fore.  With this strategy, the distant landscape becomes the fourth wall of the primary living and sleeping spaces, engaging experience with an ever-changing sense of nature. 

The interior domestic space extends into the landscape through a wall of garage door bays that completely open the loft-like living space to the garden.  This reading is reinforced by the placement of the hearth in the garden, reentering the living space within the garden itself.

Entrance into the building is attained by ascending a ramp to an exterior entrance court and into a glass enclosed stair volume.  Situated between the living and the bedroom volumes, the stair is the mediator between the living and sleeping, public and private. 

The garage is lowered in section and pulled from the street, subverting the predominate streetscape of double wide garage doors.  Its absence as foreground reveals the distant mountain view to the street.

The house, urban in language and sensibility, exists in a suburban context while it actively functions to screen it from perception. The created and barrowed garden is the remade context for the house: a simulated Arcadia situated in an American middle landscape.