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Grounded by Nature

Sea Ranch resort in San Francisco, as seen above the cliff for Ideas of Order Magazine

Welcome to Sea Ranch ...

When I was a kid growing up in San Francisco in the 1970s, my family spent every Thanksgiving weekend at Sea Ranch, the pastoral coastal community 100 miles north of the Bay Area.

We visited my aunt and uncle, who have a house there, as we have done every year since. Even to a child, there was something different about Sea Ranch: The houses were sparsely situated, grass and dirt were abundant, and the ocean was a constant presence.

I grew up as Sea Ranch expanded from a couple hundred homes to a couple thousand buildings. I matured as the place did and marveled how in a world that does not always change for the better, Sea Ranch maintained its integrity. What I did not know, way back then, was that I was spending time amid a grand design experiment. Sea Ranch was a bold attempt to reinvent how rural homes are placed in nature. The style that emerged from this windswept northern California crucible was a timeless modern design that fed directly into the late 20th-century zeitgeist and influenced the way we live — or wished we could live — now.

View of Sea Ranch building that opens to the ocean, photographed for Ideas of Order Magazine

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“As I gazed through the window, it came to me in an instant: If you built a dwelling that was limited in scope but had all you need, you, the inhabitant, would then change your life to match the space.”

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By exercising control, good design would lead to better living. Bowman knew that as is evidenced in his simple design: nothing extraneous. As writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery observed in 1939, “Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.” This Bowman cabin was naked, and I was transfixed.

By

Alex Frankel

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To appreciate fully what Sea Ranch is, you have to step back in time to 1960, and imagine what it could have been. At that time, the area was just 10 miles of rocky coastline and lonely ranchland abutting the Pacific Ocean. Known as Del Mar Ranch, the 4,000 acres of grassland had been logged, farmed with sheep, and planted with periodic rows of cypress trees to control a near constant wind. Sea Ranch would soon be developed as a planned community of mostly second homes, but the developers decided to try something new. They hired a smart team of thinkers, designers, and builders to develop the land cautiously, thoughtfully, and with foresight.

The project’s founding landscape architect, Lawrence Halprin, put together a handwritten and watercolor-painted one-page document remarkable in its simplicity:
• No lawns
• Native trees only
• No paint,
• Houses in clusters, limit heights
• Avoid suburbanization

Included in Halprin’s master landscape plan was the novel idea to preserve half of the land for common use — for wandering and walking and gazing out to sea. Today, no matter where you are in Sea Ranch, your eyes quickly find the vast Pacific Ocean and the far-off horizon, and your ears are filled with the sound of crashing waves.

Among the first buildings built at Sea Ranch was a 10-unit complex called Condominium One. Sea Ranch’s developers hired four architects, who were relatively young at the time, with the idea that they would design a building to set the tone for things to come. The architects — Charles Moore, Richard Whitaker, Donlyn Lyndon, and William Turnbull — took cues from the local barns and sheep sheds that, through integrity and strong character, belonged to the landscape. Condominium One had a blank facade and large structural timber sawn at local mills, as well as a single continuous angled roofline designed to deflect northwesterly winds. The building launched a Sea Ranch idiom, a north coast regionalist architecture of new wave, vertical redwood-sided cabins. Condominium One was a prototype for Sea Ranch, set there on the cliffs to be learned from and mirrored, added to, and copied.

View of the ocean mist at the Sea Ranch in San Franciso photographed for Ideas of Order Magazine