This beautiful Buck Creek holiday residence has been created by Fougeron Architecture on Massive Sur’s spectacular south coast, anchored in the all-natural beauty and power of the California landscape. The architects design embeds the constructing inside the land, producing a structure that is inseparable from its context. The web site, which attributes a 250-foot drop to the Pacific Ocean along the bluff and toward the west, provides dramatic views. However it demands a more complicated form than a giant picture window.
The long, thin volume of the house conforms to the organic contours of the land and the geometries of the bluff, deforming its shape and structure in response, a lot like the banana slug native to the region’s seaside forests. In this way, the complicated structural technique applies all-natural types to accommodate the siting. The major bearing technique of the residence is set back twelve feet from the bluff, both to protect the cliff’s delicate ecosystem and to make sure the structure’s integrity and safety. The residence itself is cantilevered more than the bluff. The interior is a shelter, an elegant refuge in contrast with the roughness and immense scale of the ocean and cliff.
The major body of the 3-bedroom house is composed of two rectangular boxes connected by an all-glass library/den. A a single-story concrete wing perpendicular to the primary volume holds the ground-floor bedrooms and characteristics a green roof it is the boulder that locks the property to the land. The decrease of the two primary volumes, a double-cantilevered master bedroom suite, acts as a promontory above the ocean, offering breathtaking views from its floor-to-ceiling windows. The upper volume is an open-program space-kitchen, living space, and dining room-with a swooping ceiling, all clad in wood, that follows the shape of the land.
The house’s two principal facades express both shelter and exposure. On the north, clear expanses of glass reveal ocean and coastline views lengthy strips of translucent channel glass dapple the light, playing on the sea’s shimmering surface. The south facade, clad in copper, which wraps over the roof, is mainly enclosed, supplying a retreat from the forces of nature. Roof overhangs on the east and west shield the windows and the front door from the harshness of sun and wind.
Photographs: Courtesy of Fougeron Architecture