Living Lightly
A serious home that lives barefoot.
At ground level, the house is easy. Along the ocean side of the great room, the glass slides away and the floor runs on as stone beneath the lānai. Past the posts, stone becomes grass. The lawn runs under the palms to a low hedge, and beyond it is the sand. Nothing marks the moment you leave the house.
That ease is designed. Deep eaves put shade where people want to linger, and the lānai is broad enough to work as a room of its own. Ordinary movement shapes the whole plan: in from the beach, out to the lawn, across to the pool, through the garden, back beneath the roof. Stone takes sandy feet. Timber keeps large rooms warm.
Across the garden, the second residence has a front door of its own. It takes the upper level of a separate building, under the same thatch, timber and stucco, with two en-suite bedrooms, a lānai toward the water and a full-width balcony. Family or guests can come together beneath the great roof, around the pool, on the lawn or at the beach, then cross the garden to a place of their own. Privacy here is partly architecture and partly distance.
Ocean one way, garden the other
Not every room faces the water. On the landward side of the main house, the meditation room has glass on two sides, and the garden grows right up against it. Paths run beneath the trees, where birdsong carries, and one outdoor shower is reached through a carved wooden doorway in the planting. Moving through the property means trading long horizons for close garden, strong sun for deep shade, open lawn for enclosure. The ocean is always nearby, and the house gives you places to turn away from it.
Between the two houses, the pool garden keeps the property from taking itself too seriously. A freeform pool curves through natural boulders, with a grotto set into the rock, a waterslide running down it, a shallow sun shelf and a raised spa. Beside it, a shower is enclosed by a high wall of dark lava rock. After the discipline of the main house, it is a little mischievous, and it belongs here just as much.
Places to gather. Places to disappear.
Taken together, the property holds an unusual number of ways to be there. The great room gathers people beneath one roof, and the lānai carries that gathering outside. The lawn is open ground. The pool is enclosed within its garden. The meditation room turns into the trees, the primary suite sits beneath the roof peak, and the second residence is a garden’s width away. Some of these places face the water. Others turn deliberately away.
A full house here has room in it. People can spend the day together or apart, reading, working, swimming, disappearing into the garden or walking across the lawn to the sand. The house is serious. The days here are barefoot.
