Living On The Edge: 5 Modern, Cliff-Side Homes

The thousand-foot cliffs and precipitous mountains of Big Sur, California, have a long history of attracting contrarian thinkers. “There being nothing to improve on in the surroundings,” writes Henry Miller in Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch. “The tendency is to set about improving oneself.” Surrendering to the stunning natural beauty of this sparsely populated region seems to be what people do here, and architect Mickey Muennig is no different. He renovated the Partington Point House, shown here, in 1995.

The architects designed every gesture of the home as a complement to the landscape, including the slot windows that frame views of the surrounding foliage and the walkway that follows the bedrock of the cliff.

The home’s geometric silhouette echoes the classic typology of the region’s gable roof barns. “We took our inspiration from this vernacular architecture and re-interpreted it with a contemporary twist,” Dworkind says.

For Gabriel Ramirez and his partner Sarah Mason Williams, following the Sea Ranch rules—local covenants guide new designs—didn’t mean slipping into Sea Ranch clichés. The architects love Cor-Ten steel, with its ruddy and almost organic surface, and they made it the main exterior material, along with board-formed concrete and ipe wood. The Cor-Ten, which quickly turned an autumnal rust in the sea air, and the concrete, with its grain and crannies, mean the house isn’t a pristine box, Ramirez says. His Neutra house “was very crisp and clean,” he says. “This house is more distressed, more wabi-sabi.”