Northern California’s wine-country fires, a series of conflagrations that swept the region in October 2017, were historic in the breadth of their destruction; of the Sonoma hillside structures that survived, few escaped serious damage. One building left unscathed was a board-formed concrete three-unit guesthouse, designed by Casper Mork-Ulnes and completed shortly before the wildfires as a striking adjunct to an unremarkable kit home that had come with the 18-acre property overlooking the valley. When flames severely compromised the main house but bypassed the angular guest quarters just downslope, the owners, choosing to stay and rebuild, had their primary material (concrete) and their architect (Mork-Ulnes) decided for them.
Mork-Ulnes Architects, a 2015 Record Design Vanguard firm, has offices in San Francisco and Oslo. The relatively young practice’s residential portfolio is distinguished by a project-by-project inventiveness within the Scandinavian ideal of spartan restraint, as evidenced by the compositionally dynamic Mylla Hytte in Oslo. “As a Norwegian,” says Mork-Ulnes of his bicultural influences, “I’m strongly aware of the psychological impact of light and air in architecture. California Midcentury Modernism, particularly, incorporates those elements in a way that is both instructive and fundamental to me.”
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