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Windows frame views of the picturesque landscape (1 & 2). Photos © James Leng, click to enlarge.

“We’ve tried to stretch the house, with what little square footage we have, from the ocean to the meadow and the ridge,” says James Leng, architect of record and one of four people who collectively designed and financed the project with an eye toward nurturing “an intentional community of like-minded people.”

The deck is protected by the house’s plan, which dances along the site. Photo © James Leng

Such deference harks back to Sea Ranch’s birth in the early 1960s, when legendary landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, together with developer Al Boeke, conceived it as an exercise in “ecological planning” that would “link buildings and lots into an organic whole rather than just a group of pretty houses.” Architect Joseph Esherick, who went on to win the AIA Gold Medal in 1989, followed Halprin’s cue by tucking the first few wood-shingled “demonstration homes” amid one of the cypress hedgerows that served as a windbreak when this was still grazing land.

Where Esherick’s site met a bluff above the ocean, the House of Four Ecologies sits a quarter-mile to the east near State Route 1, the two-lane highway that ties this area to the rest of California. What caught the attention of the group—three of them architects, one versed in real-estate development—was how the long-overlooked parcel includes such defining Sea Ranch elements as an open meadow and a riparian corridor against a ridgeline that parallels the coast.

Those elements explain the unorthodox layout of the house, which otherwise might confound a casual visitor.

Each of the four interlocked cubes pivots to capture a distinct perspective on the landscape while preserving as much of the terrain as possible. Step through the front door and the living room to the left offers a view of the Pacific Ocean. A sharp right leads to the unusual Garden Room, where sliding doors separate a walled-in courtyard from space that can be used for sleeping (there are sliding partitions for privacy), a studio, or indoor/outdoor gatherings. Two steps down is the largest space, a shared kitchen and dining area, alongside a porch with the obligatory hot tub, but also next to a tumble of bird-friendly shrubs and small trees nurtured by a seasonal stream. The final volume holds the primary bedroom, which faces north, to showcase the meadow and ridgeline beyond the streambed.

A walled courtyard extends the Garden Room outdoors. Photo © James Leng

The kitchen/dining area is large enough for group meals. Photo © James Leng

There’s a mindfulness to the arrangement; you are always conscious of moving from one room to the next, while secondary windows in all but the Garden Room deftly enhance the immersive sense of place. Such details aren’t the type played up in short-term-rental listings, but that’s OK, since the joint owners conceived the House of Four Ecologies for themselves.

In addition to Leng, cofounder of the firm Figure and a lecturer at the UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design, the quartet consists of Juney Lee, an architecture professor at Carnegie Mellon University; Hoang Nguyen, a principal at HOK; and Natasha Sadikin, development director at Frolic Community, who was development lead. Except for Sadikin, the others have known each other since they were undergraduates at Berkeley. The Sea Ranch house is a retreat of sorts, where the four occasionally gather as a group and each is allotted a period of time every year for their own use. “Working on something, and being able to retain some form of ownership, that’s such a privilege,” Leng adds.

Budgetary constraints loomed large, especially since the unusually intricate form made for high shell and foundation costs. The plywood panels that cloak the frame are nothing more than that: “stain it black and it disappears,” Leng says. The yellow cedar decking bleaches quickly and is far less expensive than redwood.

“The origin of Sea Ranch wasn’t about luxury,” Leng points out. “It was the interplay of elements, the warmth of basic materials.”

There’s a building boom of sorts in today’s Sea Ranch, which still has several hundred undeveloped sites; most newcomers are as large as zoning allows, with speculative builders eyeing a clientele of affluent families or friends seeking a memorable retreat in a one-of-a-kind setting. But, so long as there’s space for something like the House of Four Ecologies to rise, traces of Halprin’s early aspirations remain.

Image courtesy James Leng