Paxson Fay

Urban Code

Neighborhood context takes three houses to unexpected places.

BY CHERYL WEBER

In addition to being home to Apple’s headquarters, Cupertino, California, is known for its concentration of Eichler homes—enough to warrant their own zoning district. This compact house is in a neighborhood close to that early ’60s enclave, and it takes their quintessential indoor-outdoor qualities and climate responsiveness to the next level. The local influence, combined with the owners’ interest in Japanese design, inspired a compact courtyard house that produces as much energy as it uses.

Much of what the couple, with two young children, liked about Japanese homes was their use of a restrained natural palette to create a visually calm environment. They also appreciated domestic patterns such as a sunken entry, or genkan, and an engawa-style back porch. This focused approach also fit their bud-get-driven program and the need to keep the house small.

Its form grew out of local “wed-ding-cake” zoning, which required that the second story step back from all four sides of the first floor. For the mostly Spanish colonial-style houses around them, that meant squeezing the second floor into another pitched roof volume, something the clients wanted to avoid. “Working within the boundaries, we came up with a more modern massing that works well given the limited square footage,” says SHED principal Thomas Schaer. “We could have a 12-foot ceiling height on the second floor, which allowed us to put in lofts and storage. That added a lot of utility to rooms that would otherwise be punishingly small, especially the kids’ bedrooms.”

Another thing the clients admired about Eichler homes was their solid street face. Unlike Spanish colonial homes, with a living-room window on the front, Eichler living spaces are in the back of the house. They open to a private oasis where doors can be left open to breezes, and pets and children are safe from the street. In a neighborly nod, the rectilinear street face is framed in white stucco, with a short concrete wall, wood slats, and a Richlite-clad garage door abstracting the composition.

Space Craft

Set back roughly 20 feet in the front and back and 5 feet on the sides, the footprint maxes out the floor area ratio on its roughly 50-foot-wide lot. Visitors are led on a little journey to the front door-around a bench and low concrete wall, through a wooden gate, past an enclosed courtyard, and around another turn-before reaching the door to the genkan, where shoes are removed. To the left along the passageway, a black sliding door opens to the garage. Above the bench in the genkan, an opening high on the wall allows light to pass through to a bathroom behind it. Throughout the house, vertical wood slats have the same effect. “The vertical slats are more of a Midcentury or Scandi move,” Thomas says. “The general idea is that in lieu of a wall, there’s an intermediate way of making space, allowing light and air to pass through.”

Parallel circulation spines are a space-saving move that provides built-in functions on both sides of the hallways. At the entrance, the main spine looks straight through the house, dividing the kitchen and dining area on the right from the living room on the left, where a raised ceiling differentiates the space. This room looks out on another gravel courtyard and red maple tree occupying a notch between the house and garage. Purposeful and compressed, the living room couch is nested against a low dining room cabinet, and the 9-foot-long dining table, in turn, settles back against the kitchen island, which supports a bench.

Flowing out from the kitchen galley, a secondary corridor leads to the family room, incorporating a band of closets on one side and, on the other, a laundry tucked under the switchback stair. This service core also packs in mechanicals under the extravagantly tall roof: A ducted water heater sits behind a panel in the coat closet, and an energy recovery ventilator was squeezed into the stairway ceiling.

“The flat roof has a PV array to keep it out of sight; it’s a nice, casy-to-main-tain-and-service platform for the solar system,” Thomas says, and battery packs on the back of the house store the charge. A motorized skylight at the top of the stair draws air up and out from the courtyards, and sunlight slants down into the laundry room through slats along the switchback.

“Curves in the stairwell let light flow down and around and avoid corners, which create little bands of shadow,” Thomas says. “It’s the owner’s favorite feature.” The family room functions as a flex space: when the clients’ parents visit, its full-height pocket door can be closed, becoming a guest room with an adjacent bath.

Upstairs spaces lock together in a similar fashion. The primary bath contains a water closet and a slate-lined wet room with a shower and wooden soaking tub; between them the vanity sink is partly open to the bedroom. On the other side of the stairwell are the kids’ bedrooms, each with a loft and high windows.

“Throughout the second floor, we used the extra volume to create a sense of space and bring light in, and for two storage areas and two lofts,” Thomas says. “Eventually the kids’ beds will go up into the loft, and they can use the floor for desk space. It’s compact but fun, and very usable.”

Back Story

In this climate, reducing heat gain in summer plays a huge role in reaching Net Zero energy performance. Although full-height sliding doors open the west-facing living spaces to a low deck and small lawn at the rear of the house, they are fitted with exterior solar shades, and the covered veranda also provides protection from the sun and rain. The porch is a modernized version of an engawa, or transitional space between inside and out, Thomas says. “In a traditional Japanese house, you would install rice paper sliding doors around the perimeter and remove them in summer, using the deck as a place to sit. One of the primary differences in our Western decks is that you have furniture on it, whereas the Japanese just sit directly on the engawa or use the edge as a bench, part of the shoes-off zone.”

Solid yet adaptable, the house teases the sublime from the simple. It’s a testament not only to the design team but to the owners’ resonate dreams. “The clients told me that they went on vacation for a week in Hawaii, and the whole time they were thinking how great it will be to get home,” says Thomas. “I think what it speaks to is the level of involvement they had in the project. We want it to be an opportunity for us to try something new in the process of achieving the clients’ objectives.”