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Final(ly) House for a Deserving Couple in Marin

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This very green home is for a couple now in their nineties, who had long ago bought land near Sausalito on the Marin side of the Golden Gate Bridge.

They are only just now finally getting to live here, in a hillside next to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area – one of the Bay Areas more stunning conservation sites – that the two had campaigned to protect beginning in the ’60s.

The wry nomenclature – the Final(ly) House – indicates that it is to be their final home. And that they finally built here. The airy, simple 2,150-square-foot house is set in a 14,000 square foot parcel of land they bought so many decades ago, in the 1960s.

San Francisco architecture firm Rothschild Schwartz Architects nestled the house in the steep hillside overlooking the headlands towards San Francisco.

As the plan for a last home, a suite for a future caretaker has its own entrance (and view!)

The layout is super wheelchair-friendly.

It looks as if the entire roof has been given over to the native grasses of Northern California. Only during California’s rare seasons with rain, is the green roof green. When the drought years turn the hillside grasses yellow, so too is the roof.

Nestled on the roof is a modest sized solar system (at 2.25 KW), just right for an environmentally aware couple that knows the pleasures of the simple life.

Reclaimed redwood planks, weathered for a century, form the exterior cladding.

“We wanted the house to feel like it had always been there, something that had been rooted to the beautiful saddle,” says  Jessica Rothschild, LEED AP, of  Rothschild Schwartz.

She and partner Reuben Schwartz positioned the building’s fly-ash concrete base partly into the hillside; “Inside the concrete is exposed, and that reinforces how the house is tied to the land,” Rothschild says, noting, too, that the concrete is board-formed to foment a “tactile sense of the outside.”

While the back of the house is firmly rooted in the hill, the front is a curtain wall of glass, shaded by a reclaimed redwood  brise soleil using the same weathered-for-a-century timbers from nearby redwood forest.

You can see from the inside how the rhythm of posts along the curtain wall with its dappled shade feels almost like a trellis holding up the green roof over the simple structure.

Inside, the furnishings are sparse and frugal – leaving luxurious space for two wise nonagenarians who live their lives uncluttered by a lifetime’s temporary wants.

A very unassuming Final House.

Via: GreenSource