Case Study Revisited
Shed House is the first ground-up residence Boyd has designed, working with Laurel Broughton. They had collaborated on the pool and cabana at the 1956 Ellwood Steinman House, when Broughton made the construction drawings of Boyd’s concepts.
The 6000-square-foot house in the Malibu hills is deceptively simple. A long bar of rooms clad in gray-stained boards intersects a white stucco block to form a T. Both wings have monopitch roofs, which tilt up to reveal treetops and mountains, and down to frame the ocean a quarter mile away. They give the house its name and impart a sense of motion. It’s a fusion of architecture and nature, rooted in the luxuriant landscaping, and contrasting sharply with the showy mansions that jut from neighboring hilltops.
For the client and his wife, it was a huge leap from their historic house in Old Town Alexandria, although they had often summered beside the Pacific. Inspired by an article on a Craig Ellwood house that Boyd had restored, they decided they would enjoy a change of style and scenery, so they wrote to ask if he could find them another modern classic in Malibu. It proved a fruitless quest, and they grew tired of waiting. As Boyd recalls, “one evening over dinner, the client said, ‘why don’t you design it yourself?’ and, after a moment of pause, I said ‘that’s a great idea.'”
Boyd found a run-down 1950s bungalow on a gently sloping acre of land and fixed it up as a temporary retreat for the clients while he and Broughton developed their ideas for the house that would replace it. “Before we tore it down, we saw how well it was sited, and we located the new indoor-outdoor fireplace at exactly the same point to preserve a memory of the old,” says Boyd. He raised the pad about 18 inches to give the new house a better view of the ocean, and decided on a T-plan, similar to that of the Strick House.
Inspiration came from the Case Study Houses. “I wanted to capture the soul of that program and its many variations, from the rigor of Craig Ellwood to the woodsiness of William Wurster”, says Boyd. “I tried to push the ideas in those houses even further, stripping down and adding warmth. I was also thinking of the conceptual clarity of the iPhone. My brother is a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford and we share in our work, if nothing else, a love of elegant solutions.”
The client gave Boyd a free hand but stipulated that the roofs should slope. “I grew up in a small Michigan town, living in a flat-roofed house and I soon discovered that they are prone to leak–even in a dry climate,” the client observes. Boyd accepted the challenge, and the complementary angles of the roofs on each wing create a lively dialog.
The entry is recessed to reveal the free-standing fireplace, which serves as a marker, and is clad in shimmering Heath tiles. It draws you into the living room and out through glass sliders to the pool terrace on the south side. The master suite looks over the pool to the ocean, and guest bedrooms occupy the north and west ends. Throughout, there’s a sense of openness; of spaces flowing through the house as freely as the ocean breezes.
Anticipating a delay in securing permits, Boyd installed new plantings at the outset. In his own house and commissions across the city, he has honed his skills in creating green architecture, using trees and shrubs as organic sculptures, strategically placed to complement windows and walls. Mists from the ocean nurture palms and bamboo, birds of paradise and other subtropical shrubs, which blur the boundaries of the site. Brightly colored steel sculptures emerge from dense plantings in the kitchen garden like tigers in a Douanier Rousseau painting.
Varied textures and tones enrich the simple forms. The gray cladding boards are sandblasted and wire-brushed, and the sand finish of the white stucco catches the light. Floorboards of stained French oak scattered with rugs complement the narrower oak boards of the ceilings, which are parchment-glazed in the main block and silver-gray in the flanking wing. The walls at either end of the living room are painted aluminum, and the study niche at the mid-point is clad in grass cloth.
Designing the interiors spurred Boyd to create his own furniture. He transformed salvaged sliding doors of old-growth Douglas fir from the bungalow into the first Plank chairs, and that was the seed of PLANEfurniture, a range that now comprises a hundred variations on 25 basic designs. In Shed House, PLANEfurniture alternates with a few vintage American and European finds, as well as the clients’ growing collection of contemporary art. The spareness of the furnishings makes every detail stand out clearly. For Boyd, this is a manifesto. “In the deluge of choices that confront us today, editing is a viable option for creation,” he explains. “Building on the innovations of the past can bring us renewal for the future.”
