Apple architect picks a small prefab to savor CA countryside.

Sometimes I think when people build a house, they want to express all the cool things that they can get into the house. And for us, in this moment, it was kind of the opposite. We wanted to do as little as possible and make a comfortable place to live. Very good. So the house is super small. What's going on? Everything was just to be as light on the ground as possible. We wanted to respect the place. The house is just a simple container, and the two long sides are completely dematerialized. It's just the doors, the glass doors, and they can push all the way to the side like they are now on both sides, and on a day like today, the breeze just goes right on through like a dogtrot house, and you never really use air conditioning. It's just always wonderful. Because when it's all open, it feels just like you're in a cover porch, like an outside space. So it's really just, it's one room. The idea was that because the two glass walls are so kind of transparent, everything is just inside of the walls, and the space just kind of flows all the way around. So in here, we have our kitchen. That wall is our kitchen. We have our dining room, which is this table that I built. The only thing that creates a definition of the space is this little white box, and then the circulation to the bathroom and to the shower just happens to be around that box. And the box ends up being either the smallest bedroom or the biggest bed, because that's where Jules sleeps is behind the TV, in the box. In here, it's the bedroom. It's quite small, but it really doesn't matter. It's a really comfortable bed. So I just, this is where I typically hang out. Yeah, just kind of like be my own little space because if they want to watch something, I don't really feel like watching. I can just close the doors, and then I'm kind of in my own area. And the box actually has, on all four sides, pocket doors. So he can get his privacy if he wants, but it can completely close itself off. So it just pops out, gets nestled, and then it's kind of blocked off. And I have all of that to see, which is kind of wasted on me when I, I don't get to wake up to see it because I wear glasses, and then I can't see when I wake up. I don't know, other people have told me it's a great experience. It's got a ton of storage. So we have extra cooking supplies in there. We have like miscellaneous in here, then extra food in that box. And I can line my stuff up on the sides, and it's really just a place where I can hang out. And I can close the doors, and we can do both sides. And then I can also do it here, for when I want to shower and stuff. That's it for the bathroom. The way that the bathroom is organized, on the right side of the bed is the shower, and on the left side of the bed is the toilet and the sink. So there's a glass dividing line between the two, so that there's some privacy. But we put the shower on this side, so that if you wanted to, you could open up your shower to the view. You shower with your glasses on? No. So you wouldn't see the view anyway? Yeah. So when we, BJ originally did this, Jules was gonna sleep on a pull-out couch. We were like, oh, we only have a few more years, so he goes to college, we'll sleep in this room. We started looking for couches, and couldn't find a pull-out that we liked, and we're like, we need to figure out a new sleeping situation. And there's a lot of things with fire code out here. If you make your house too big, you have to up what you're doing fire-wise. And so. So we built another house. So we built another house instead. The other house is really the same as this house, but smaller. We wanted it to be very, very close in nature to the first house. So really, the detailing's all very the same. It's a smaller version. But what was really great was, by shifting it over and sliding it up the hill, the two things actually play off of each other. And we just connect them with a really simple folded metal stair that bridges between the two foundations. My wife and I, Danielle, sleep here. So really, they're the same size, they're the same height, but one really feels lifted up than the other. A lot of times, the things that look the simplest are the things that actually take the most struggle and the most time to actually work it out. To me, it's like, how small can you make it, and it does everything you want, right? It doesn't always cost the total least that you can spend. It doesn't take the least amount of time. But in the end, it feels super gratifying to try to get there. When we first got the place, there was nothing here. And so, we just wanted to come spend time here. So the first thing we did was, we kinda camped. So we pitched a tent in the trees, and we just came every weekend we could and just tried to discover what it was gonna be like, you know, where the sun came up and what the weather was like, and yeah. For years, for a year. And then in the first year, BJ started building that shed. And the second year, I said, okay, I'm done with tents, no more tents, I'm gonna sleep in there. And so I just put a full lounge chair in the shed and slept in the shed. When we moved, or when we decided to camp, the person who did our septic system actually put in a toilet and a sink. So we actually, it became glamping. So it felt like we had a kitchen and a coffee pot in here. We had it all. We had boiling water, we had to do it all. It was all set up and all labeled, and we had a full-size refrigerator. And this was my bedroom. And then BJ would sleep outside in a hammock. Jules and I slept in the two hammocks in between the trees. The hammocks worked until one day, the fog came in so strong, it was like raining on us. We got soaked, so yeah. And then we had our table outside. Yeah, so then we came out here. We would eat here, and before that little house was there, this was our view, and this little alley of trees was like our living room, basically. Yeah. It was all shaded, and it was hot. So you started to get a sense of where you wanted to be on the road. Yeah, what the weather was like, where the wind came from, and we just kind of felt it out for a while. And we started thinking about, well, what would the little house be like? Love the idea of Prefab. And I'm an architect. I wanted to be super involved, but I didn't have the time to do all the work. To build something on site means you gotta be here all the time. You gotta answer 100 questions all the time. And so doing something where it could be built in a factory and then brought all done and just plopped down, that sounded like a dream. So I started doing some research as to who could help with the Prefab. You know, you'd start out with a really simple idea. It doesn't get any more simple than a tube. This is what we started out with the original Wee House, is I'm gonna take an eight-foot-high volume, because that times out with off-the-shelf sliding glass doors. And we're gonna wrap that, and we're gonna make the space go right through, you know? So there it is. And whatever your landscape, whatever your view is through there, is what you get. I came across Alchemy, Jeff Warner, and he had done his first project. I told him it was the best thing he ever did, and he was like, wow, but I've been working all this day. But I said, it's because it was so simple, so pure, so perfect. It was so close to its original idea. And I said, I just wanna do something like that, but let's have fun, let's make it even better. It was a little, super tiny house, one room. Everything was into one little space. But I loved that it was, there was nothing extra. It was just super straightforward. So the house was designed in Minneapolis, and it was ended up built in Oregon in a factory there. And then we ended up taking it on a truck and bringing it down here and installing it here. You can't do it in one piece, because when the truck goes down the highway, the maximum width is 15 foot 11 and three quarters or something. There's a set number that is the maximum width any module can drive down the highway. One of the most amazing things was when the crane came to lift the houses and put them onto the site, the crane had to actually lift the houses and thread the needle between the trees. And it's crazy amazing. It looks like the trees grew up after the houses were here, but the people with the crane and the set crew did such an amazing job of just barely missing the trees. The trees are completely grown around the house. Prefab for me was a way of building super efficiently. When folks build in a factory, they want to get it out of their factory so they can get the next thing in. When you build on site, everybody wants to juggle your job with everybody else's job. And it's really, it's like, you have to beg them to come to your site to finish the work, right? So prefab is a really efficient way of working. So everything was already installed, including the ceiling fan, the sinks, the toilets. It was all built in Oregon completely. The only thing that was done here on site were the windows were put in on site because they didn't want them to jiggle around in the truck as it was moving. Prefab, it's time efficient and it's resource efficient and it doesn't have to be small ideas. It can be big ideas. This was a really interesting kind of spot because it's tucked in the trees and it's actually from higher up on the site, you don't actually even see the house at all. But from this place, the view opens up and you actually can feel like you're part of the valley. So the original plan was just to do this one house and we situated it so it was on the edge of the view. The porch actually is a second module that attaches to the internal house. And actually the porch is completely cantilevered off the edge. So from this line forward, everything actually has just air underneath of it. And so from the other side of the house looking back, it's completely reaching out into the landscape. So by the time you get to here, you're well over the view, you're well over the ground and you're up in the air. So even though the house feels completely embedded on the uphill side, it's completely free and separate on the downhill side. One of the things that we wanted to do was find a material for the inside of the house that could be the same on the floor, the walls and the ceiling and inside and outside. And so we landed on this Ipe, which is a tropical hardwood, because it's so tough and so water resistant and so pest resistant, it can be outside and inside. That kind of lines the inside of the box. The outside of the box is covered in Corten steel and it's actually a steel that rusts on its own in order to protect itself from the elements. So all of this material here and then on the outside of the buildings is Corten steel. The pattern on the outside of the building is a custom pattern that Jeff Warner came up with that is a series of in and out pieces of different dimensions. He likes this idea because when you put two modules together, the seam can be concealed and you don't see where the seam is. It's not an obvious break. And so on the side of this big house, the two modules got put together and you can't tell where the seam is. So this is the mini kitchen with our mini fridge. So we have the full size in the shed, which is my mom's brilliant idea. Because I'm like, we have no freezer. She said, put a fridge in your shed. I'm like, oh my God, mom, that's the best idea you've ever had. And then we have a countertop ice maker because you really kind of want to have ice. You've got to have ice to drink. And then just the two top, because we don't actually cook inside that often. In the winter we do more, but mostly we grill because the oven's pretty tiny. It's a small oven, microwave, combined European. We have to read the directions to get it to work. Jules is the first one to learn because he's the only one willing to read the directions. So the table is a piece of black walnut from a salvaged tree that fell. It's one piece of wood. It's from a gargantuan old tree. It's the easiest table in the world to make because all you do is you cut it and sand it and done. And I got some planks from Etsy. So everything, you know, like the house, the wood just floats and the air just goes through. How often do you leave it closed? Well, it just all depends on the weather. Sometimes actually it's not warm enough to actually open both sides of the house. And so we just open one side of the house. It's on the really hot days that you open it and both sides, the wind can go right on through. Fully tunable. Wanted to integrate all the details for all the things that need to be here, but I didn't necessarily want to see them. So all of the doors and all the tracks are completely integrated. There's actually a roller blind that comes down from the ceiling. It's a 25 foot long bug screen that comes out of the ceiling and you can still see through the view. You still get all the air, but it actually makes it really, really pleasant. So one big roller from there all the way to there. And so when we want to have the windows open, but at like dusk, when the bugs are getting a little bit nasty, we can actually shut that down and the breeze can still come through. So we can really open the whole house and make it a big screen porch. It's really super pleasant, especially it gets cool at night and it's really pleasant. You don't need air conditioning. And so you just have the wind blowing through and it makes it like amazing to sleep. Actually an added benefit of the screens, I can tell you is we actually put the screens down when we leave at the end of the weekend. And when the birds are in a migratory season, it actually, the screens enough to keep the birds from getting confused by the glass. And so it kind of, there's a double purpose. Here, let's move. It gets really, when all the doors pile on, it's really dark. But we used to get better light. So then the other half of the bathroom is on this side of the bed. And it's basically just a little floating sink and a toilet and a medicine cabinet. There's another pocket door for privacy here. The thing that I actually thought was kind of the coolest thing that other people don't in my family think is so cool is that when the pocket door closes, it doesn't touch the glass. It stops at the column. Hence, very little privacy. So we had a little disagreement about that. That wasn't cleared with me before. I was like, what's going on here? Bathroom door doesn't close all the way. Visual privacy. Bathroom door doesn't close. The glass wall is like, you know, the sacred thing. You don't want to touch the glass wall. So anything that comes to the glass wall has to respect the glass wall. So there's a little bit of respect right here. So on this side, first thing you run into is the shoe stand. That's a little block I built. So it's all laminated pieces we put back together. So most of the time I come up here and build little projects because I can't sit still. Even on this side, even though it's very much embedded in the ground here, the metal box actually floats even above the foundation. There's a little gap that you can see that's here that actually keeps this off the foundation. And then the two houses are actually slipped off of their foundations in a kind of a similar way, but opposite. So that house is pushed that way and that way. And this house is pushed this way and that way. And because of the gap underneath, from all sides it looks like the box is floating and not in the ground. The foundation's in the ground, but the box floats. And so when you get to the other side, when it really floats, it makes sense. It's really hovering. And there are always rules about everything that you do when you build something. So when you build a house, you have to have exterior lighting. It's like a rule. You can't get your permit without it. So I was trying to think about, okay, well, how can you do exterior lighting that actually feels right? Because I didn't want to attach a light to the house. I didn't want to have something that looked like an industrial light of some sort. I ended up finding these are Corten steel, like what the house is made out of. And they're actually called twigs. And they look and feel organic, like they grew here. And so then the way to connect the two independent volumes, this is a series of folded galvanized steel plates that really just span between the two foundations. It's really just a little plate of steel. And then all the ground can just flow right on through. So when it rains, all the water just runs between the houses and they really feel independent. And so it almost disappears. So the siding of this house, it has the same relationship on its uphill side as the first house has, but because the topography actually has changed here, you actually then, because it's pushed, you rise up. And from this one, it creates a fully different view than the first house. What it does functionally is it actually creates privacy between the two bedrooms. The two solid walls actually create a separation and the angle of view is cut off. So we can sleep here and there's no window shades. There's no privacy shades, but there's privacy. So where there's nobody looking because they're so far away is always open, but where there's someone else on the site, it's contained. So that's really the magic of the siding of the two houses. So Remus has taken this opportunity because he's not ever allowed in this house. He's curious. So this house has similar sliding doors and it actually has sliding screens instead of the rolling screens. Because it's smaller and there's just two, we just move the sliding screen from one side to the other and we can either have this side fully open or that side fully open and we can do the same kind of breezy thing, but we didn't have to have the rolling shade in order to do it. Really, the construction of this house and the construction of that house are really the same. And the difference really is that here, we didn't need a TV and a bed. So the obstruction between the occupied space and the service space is our closet. So we actually have a, so on this side, we have a washer dryer in one unit. And then on this side, we have like a grownup closet. And you keep some kitchen stuff there too. Well, we store things anywhere we can store things. When you have a little house, you just store things anywhere you can. And then we walk around it the same way as in the other house to the shower. So in this house, you can actually fully open this up and then you can actually shower outside. So you can take a shower and not use the shade and keep it fully open. You still actually have visual privacy from the other house, but you actually can be part of the view. And it's all one floor. And it's all the floors. So this is the same Ipe flooring. So the inside of all the boxes are Ipe on the floor, the wall and the ceiling, inside and outside. So the trick was to find a material that could be all of the surfaces and inside and outside and survive the weather. And it actually, because of that, we can take it right into the shower and it can be the floor of the shower. It can be the wall of the shower and even the ceiling of the shower. The other name of Ipe is ironwood. And so it will last for like 50 years in the wet. It doesn't mold, it doesn't rot. It's super hard. It's great. But the box ends up being, first of all, it's a little bit of light material. It's oak. And it also, it gives us spatial separation. The reason I love it that they're boxes is they don't touch the side walls and the space flows around. And so it's a way of separating the spaces. And in each house, there's really only a need to separate one time. Because otherwise you would have had to put a wall. Yes, no walls. So similarly, the other side has the sink unit and the toilet and the medicine cabinet. There's no privacy shades. You're always outside. And then, like I said, I'm always antsy. So I built these little cabinets where we recharge our phone or put a light. This is mahogany. This is the same wood that the windows are made out of. But it has a similar quality from the Ipe. And right now I'm making these benches. This one's less far along than this one, but they're gonna be where you can put your clothes when you take a shower. I really can't sit still. So I always have to do something. And so as long as there's a project. It's a mess inside of wires, but the beautiful thing is when you close it up, you don't sense them, right? And then I can, sometimes you find really cool things. This is the most amazing light that sits on a charger. And then it's like a little bottle and you can take it anywhere and have it be a glowing bottle of light at night. So that's a little nightstand light. We tried, as we did venture out from the house, we tried to make outside spaces that could be part of the living of the house. And it feels like the whole thing is a place where you live. It's not just a little teeny house. One of the things, especially when the weather is wonderful like it is today, we created spaces outside where we could actually hang out. So where that dining table is, we also tried to get a little place where you can sit down and read a book in the sun or in the shade. We ended up choosing this 25-year-old olive tree that we found. That's a failed piece of furniture. That's like a prototype. It pulled itself apart, wrong kind of wood. This also is the place where we do almost all of our cooking. It's half a smoker and half a grill. So it's actually really outdoor living. And so all of these cabinets have, these are all kind of steel door cabinets. So I can get in there and clean the coals, you know, and get in there and clean it out. Or it's a little bit of work, but you know, the best things take effort. Yeah. We're trying to find the balance between the natural and the manmade. These steps, these are out in the wild grass and they just feather out into the landscape. So that line between like what we did and what we didn't do and what we found is super blurry. And so when we created this terrace here with the pool in it, that was the one place where we said, okay, we're going to have some grass. We're going to have it more tailored and more manicured. And then all around it, it's the natural environment just comes in. The trick about the pool is, can we get the water up to the surface of the surround so that when light reflects off of it, it doesn't look like there's any edges. And so there's this really cool little trick slot right here that's only half an inch wide. And the water actually, this stone and this stone are actually the exact same elevation, but the capillary action pulls the water into the slot. And so as the water circulates through the pool, it returns to the system through this little slot. So the water is always just completely level. How did you come up with that? I don't know, it's maniacal. It's almost like a reflecting pool more than it is a swimming pool. It's solar thermal heating. The water recirculates to the top of the little house and it goes through so many tubes that it gets heated by the sun. And then it comes back into the pool and that's actually how it warms itself. The pool cover is actually like cool. The hatch in the bottom of the floor of the pool opens and the pool cover starts to uncurl and it starts to float towards the surface. The architect of the house came here and after the pool was here, and he said, oh my God, the pool cover is the coolest thing. It's like a James Bond movie. And it just keeps unrolling and keeps floating until it gets to the end. And so we closed it at night to keep the heat in. And this is the only kind of pool cover that you can get when the water is at the same elevation. There's no tracks, you know, it has to float. Yeah, we should go see the garden. This is where we used to camp back here. The first weekend we were here, we had friends up here, so we had a whole bunch of tents pitched and it was tough. Because when you first come to the site and you look for a place to sleep, you don't want to be super exposed. You want to find a place where you can kind of nestle. And these little alleys of trees were like the comfortable spot. And it's like primitive man, what are the first thing they do? They make a fire pit, right? And finding shelter, right? Yeah, you find shelter in the trees, you make a fire in a fire pit, and you know, you live on the land. So Danielle said, one of the things we must have is we must have a garden for vegetables and herbs and things. And so this is another project that I built. It's actually a kit, like a regular old greenhouse, hoop house kit. They're meant to just be hoops that are parallel and they put plastic over the ends and make a greenhouse. So I ended up getting the kit and just taking the same parts, but arraying them in a donut shape. And the reason that we even did it at all is we needed to have an enclosure to keep the deer out. And so Jules and I built the structure together. And then these are just water troughs like the cows drink out of. So this is the herb garden right there. And these are crazy carrots that I think they've probably planted too many, but they all came out. I don't know when we're supposed to pick them. Let's try, actually. Are those from seeds? Yeah, these were from seeds. Let's see what happens. Well, they're still little baby carrots. So they still have some way. Look at how funny that is. Living in a city, we don't get to do this. Like, this is so exciting. And these are going to be green beans, I'm hoping. I see flowers, so I think that they're going to flower green beans. And these pea pods went crazy. We didn't really know what we were doing, so I think I might've over-planted. Like the worst batter. We didn't know what would come up and what wouldn't. These all started from seeds. So these were little, they were just seeds. The whole thing. Even the artichokes were seeds. Started those in San Francisco. Come look at my watermelon. This is serious. Look at this artichoke. This is serious. This is like year one. It's like we're living off the lawn mower here. And then in the center, where it all came together, we planted grapes. I mean, we're not really like green thumb people. Honestly. The fact that any of it's growing is a miracle. So this one's doing well. And then that's our little fruit tree orchard. That's why there's a fence around it, because there's 15 fruit trees. I made this trail because this is how we get to our water tank and then onto the hiking trails. Yeah, so from up here, you can see how those houses are just, you can't, they're concealed by the trees. So the original plan was to put a big house up here. And as you get up higher, you do see over the trees and you do see further. But it felt more intimate down at the lower part of the hill. And it's also nice to have some natural environment above you and below you. The beautiful breeze that comes up the hill, it's just, in this spot, it's just as magical. So we wanted to really be in the middle of it. And all of those things that you learn in architecture school about opening one side and closing the other and letting the solar heat in the winter and let the breeze cool in the summer, it all works. I think a lot of people don't necessarily buy into the idea of less is more. A lot of people think that more is more. And they add features and they add size and they add complexity and it makes them feel like they've actually gotten more. No, but you can't think food is toys. How's that apple? Is it not ready? Good. And I think it's much more difficult and much harder to kind of get there through doing less. And so that's the fun challenge. All right, what do we have in here? I can eat some more. The American system of building is you cover all the intersections with a molding or a trim. Modern detailing exposes every problem and you have to resolve it. You see where everything comes together. There's nowhere to hide. If you look at every intersection of every material, none of them look happenstance. Everyone looks intentional. Everyone looks like it was laid out on purpose. And so that to me is like the resolution that most people don't ever care to look at or see, but I think you feel it when you're just in the environment. Interesting. Yeah, like every column is on the board spacing, every light, every sprinkler, every piece comes together in a way that was planned. And so it's really hard to resolve all those details in buildings. And as the buildings get bigger and more complicated and have more requirements, that is a bigger and bigger challenge. But for me, it's this kind of poetic puzzle. Like how can you really make it feel like there's a harmony in all the pieces that come together? I think you learn this when you're in architecture school, this kind of iterative process where you're always kind of layering, layering ideas and then trying to strip out stuff that gets in the way. And you try to focus in on the kernel of the idea and you want every little detail to just reinforce that one simple, clear idea. That's what's really great about building something small is that you can actually get closer to resolving all of the weird distractions that come up in the world. Like the structure, the regulatory things, your wife's requests, like everything that comes up, like you wanna be able to address all of those things and you want them to look effortless and like they just were inevitable. So, I mean, that's what's, it's hard on a big project. It's a little easier on a small project, but it takes a lot of discipline to just keep at it. I always felt like really great architecture is like a really great poem. Like you have to work it, work it, work it. You reduce it down to the things that only say like what they have to say and you get rid of everything else. And that's like where the sweet spot is for me.