Carmel House
Design inspiration — while guided by client dreams, goals, and ideas — comes most often from the special qualities of the site itself: light, landscape, views, local context, and spirit.
Located on a sloping site in the Santa Lucia Preserve, the house fronts on open grassland below and looks along the back through a spaced screen of California live oaks into dense woodlands up the hill. The one-story, 3,025 SF house was designed for two busy professionals as a weekend place of sanctuary and spiritual regeneration that was to segue into a year-round home. The building winds along the contours with a low, gable-roofed bedroom/study wing at either end of a central high-roofed, clerestory-lit core for living, dining, and cooking. The earth-colored stucco, charcoal-grey roof, and sage-green doors and windows echo the dusty, sun-baked colors of the site. The introduced landscape is kept simple and meets the natural grasslands, mown twice a year, which change with the seasons from green to gold.
Green Features
- Sited and shaped to maximize daylight and natural ventilation.
- High-performance glass used in doors and windows.
- Radiant heating with high-efficiency boiler and concrete floors throughout maximizes performance and increases enjoyment of heating system.
- Passive cooling through natural ventilation aided by ceiling fans. High thermal mass in the concrete floors, coupled with natural ventilation, works well in this climate zone. The daily summer-temperature changes from day to night mean that the lag-time effects of the floor releasing the heat of the day and the cool of the night help to passively regulate the temperature.
- Structural concrete-mix design to have a minimum of 50% fly ash for cementitious materials. Fly ash, a waste by-product of coal burned to produce electricity, when added to concrete improves its strength and can be used to replace cement, the production of which increases global warming.
- Dimensional lumber specified as either engineered or FSC certified. When the house was built, FSC lumber was only seasonally available at the grade required. This is no longer the case.
- Low-water-use fixtures throughout.
- All lights are either fluorescent or on dimmers.
- Radiant barrier integrated with roof sheathing — an energy-saving strategy to block 97% of radiant heat at the roof.
- High R-value insulation in all assemblies; formaldehyde-free batts used throughout.
- Built-in recycling center.
- Energy Star appliances.
Project Team
- Builder: DMC Construction, Pacific Grove, California
- Interiors Design and Decorative Lighting: Sherry Williamson Design
- Structural Engineering: GFDS Engineers (Kris Johnson)
- Landscape Design: Joni Janecki & Associates
- Photography: David Wakely