From the Archive: The Rise of the “Exurban House”

As a part of our 25th-anniversary celebration, we’re republishing formative magazine stories from before our website launched. This story previously appeared in Dwell’s January/February 2003 issue. 

The exurban house is in. Or, rather, out. Far out, at road’s end, beyond freeway and subdivision. Neither rural nor suburban, exurban houses lie deep in the countryside, yet within striking distance of chic eats and leisure-time activities. Their extra-large lots, usually far in excess of two or three acres, encourage privacy, yet include chef’s kitchens and media rooms for entertaining. Enjoying the affluence of contemporary times, exurban residents strive for a pleasurable and provocative style of landscape living. Recent house designs by Northern California architects Fernau & Hartman and Stanley Saitowitz are typical of the exurban phenomenon, where the experience of setting is taken to the outer limits.

While exurban houses aim to dance with nature, their designers must contend with one of architecture’s oldest challenges: how to adapt a building to the different rhythms of nature and society.

For thousands of years, houses resembled their landscapes, but not out of aesthetic intent. Houses sprang out of the particularities of local agricultural tasks, building tradition, terrain, and climate. Their materials—be they wood or stone—came from nearby. Each design decision, from the thickness of walls to the pitch of a roof, was all part of a struggle for survival.

During the Renaissance, rising affluence allowed architects to subvert a house’s dependence on its natural setting. Beginning with Raphael and Palladio in the 16th century, the design of houses for the elite reveled in the strictness of geometry and the freedom of art. Designed landscapes began to resemble ideas and drawings, and emanated from a house’s straight lines and right angles. Eyes replaced hands as, for the elite, landscape became a field of viewing rather than sowing something to be gazed at musingly from a veranda. By the 20th century, as championed by architects like Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, industrial materials—steel, reinforced concrete, and plate glass—further struck home the aesthetic (and technological) relationship between house and landscape.

As early as the 19th century, however, this aesthetic approach to the landscape provoked negative reactions. Certain architects, most notably those involved with the British Arts and Crafts movement, began to argue for a reintegration of domestic building with landscape, for houses that snugly settled into place. But as architects dove back into the intricacies and constraints of nature, the socioeconomic conditions of a working relationship between house and landscape were vanishing. During those same years of the industrial era, for the first time in human history, wilderness became attractive. Freed from the toil of the fields and the dangers of wild animals, people began to embrace long-feared feral lands. This love had less to do with an all-out immersion in wilderness than with a casual, predominantly visual appreciation of its striking attributes.

Perhaps it’s no wonder, then, that today’s houses designed for the countryside and wilderness—or, more realistically, exurbia—approach nature boldly. Nature is no longer something that needs to be contended with, as with agrarian building, or vanquished by pure artistic forms. These days, our world’s largely domesticated nature has become a flexible element in architecture’s arsenal. 

Moore, Lyndon, Turnbull and Whittaker’s Condominium I (1965) at Sea Ranch, on the coast of Northern California, epitomizes the ways architects have embraced wild and agrarian landscapes only to squeeze out bold iterations of form and space. The unique appearance and site of the building—poised between abstract art and grainy vernacular, on a peaceful meadow above a rocky ocean cliff—struck a chord in people’s yearning for an alternative to city or suburb. Sea Ranch may very well have spawned the idea of exurban houses, spread over the landscape at low densities, like the working American farms of old, yet stamped with an aura of astonishing sensory experience.

To this day, exurban architecture flourishes, especially in California. In a series of houses completed over the past decade, Berkeley-based architects Richard Fernau and Laura Hartman have furthered domestic communion with landscape and continued traditions of San Francisco Bay Area architects from William Wurster to William Turnbull. While Fernau & Hartman’s preference for bright colors and angular projections might seem to be unrelated to site, almost all their decisions emerge from an inspection of landscape attuned to client desires. Generally, their houses are situated to maximize beautiful panoramas and minimize the visual intrusion of blight. For instance, at the von Stein residence (1992), in Sonoma County, California, the west side of the house becomes an opaque wall so as to close off the presence of neighbors and the afternoon sun. All the primary viewing corridors from rooms and terraces look out on the prized vineyards of the Valley of the Moon. 

But exploiting stunning long-range views is only part of how Fernau & Hartman encourage a closer interaction between house and landscape. Reflecting the clients’ desire for outdoor living, site plans alternate interior rooms and exterior patios. The architects take full advantage of topography, and their houses seem to hop up hillsides or skip across the creases of valleys. The von Stein house, for instance, is organized around a central spine, which links a series of alternating indoor and outdoor rooms (including a tower) that step up the hillside. While encouraging al fresco dining, socializing, and contemplation, this division into discrete zones also separates public spaces, workspaces, and sleeping quarters. Exurban dwelling comes with social interaction—but only when you want it.

The encounters encouraged by Fernau & Hartman’s designs correspond with the sensory overload characteristic of contemporary life. Akin to the myriad channels offered by digital cable packages, these houses present a wide range of experiences, available at the turn of one’s eyes or a short walk down a flight of stairs. Encompassing extreme long shots as well as close-ups, panoramas of fields and ocean, brushings with stone and grass, the houses are like a cinematic lens for probing the landscape. But in this case the experience is all around, palpably local, and teeming with texture.

Although Stanley Saitowitz’s practice is based in San Francisco, his exurban houses don’t stem from the Bay Area tradition, but rather come from Southern California modernism, reaching from Richard Neutra to Craig Ellwood and the Case Study House movement. Influenced by the experiments of land artists like Michael Heizer, Saitowitz’s razor-sharp houses expand modernism into a geologic and topographic dimension, exposing the layers of landscape by building into, out of, and across them. At the Byron Meyer house (1990-2000), in Sonoma County, the design reshapes both its site and its inhabitants. A ravine separates the primary bedroom suite, atop a hill, from the main living area, on a separate promontory. The bridge that joins them, tartly expressed by red steel trusses, connects discrete realms of landscape and occupants.

Over the past couple of years, Saitowitz has embarked on an experiment that he calls the bar houses. The flat-roofed houses are built as thin glass-and-steel shafts, varying from 22 to 25 feet in thickness. This linear plan type allows Saitowitz to wrap each house into the landscape in a different way. Bars cross over each other at right angles, loop up in spirals, or crisscross to fashion internal courtyards. The twists and turns of the bar houses correspond largely to topographic conditions. And, as in most exurban houses, private and public spaces are separated from each other. In one of the bar houses, located in Marin County, the private zone sits directly atop the public zone. So far nothing new. But their separation is accentuated by the fact that windows on each floor open out in different directions. Above, the private rooms afford a medium-range view of the hillside; below, the living quarters tender long-range panoramas of the oak-studded hills. By closing off the opposing views from each zone with opaque walls, Saitowitz focuses public and private space as divergent landscape encounters.

As the bar houses snake and slither, going straight along, suddenly ramping up into a half circle, or crisply turning a 90-degree corner, they rearrange the state of affairs on the land. Describing the bar houses as ribbons or rulers, Saitowitz conceives of them as instruments for taking the measure of a landscape. In one sense, the bars continue landforms and vehicular routes, as earthen slopes become asphalt driveways, interior corridors, and eventually terraces outside bedrooms that look back at the land. But rather than imitating or continuing natural features, the bar houses often buck the current of their sites. They cut across the grain of land, much asthe San Francisco city grid reveals a precipitous topography by crashing into it. Saitowitz’s houses are sharpest when their artifice reveals the complex scope of landscape, when straight steel edges cut into the earth to uncover its ancient strata, or when rectangular pools of water float shifting pictures of structure, site, and sky. The bars might be described as stealth architecture, curiously probing at every detail of landscape, but skulking all the while. Because of the bar houses’ thinness and transparency, the landscape is often seen through them. Houses are more frames than forms.

As the different approaches of Fernau & Hartman and Stanley Saitowitz show, the exurban house gets its jolt from a confrontation with remote and amply sized landscapes. It is a restless refuge, at one moment curling residents into site and seconds later rocketing their eyes toward far horizons. Most exurban houses wear their design casually but those same houses also climb hillsides and ford uneven ridges. The experience for residents is a storm of sensations—intricate and scattered, restful and dramatic. And yet one of the casualties of the exurban house seems to be that worked zone of landscape emblematic of country houses of old: the garden. Nowadays, perimeters around exurban houses are blended in with the "wilds," their artifice disguised to promote a pristine, almost primal engagement of occupant with landscape.

The exurban house follows a long tradition of wealthy people fleeing the ills of the city for the glories of the country. The chief difference today lies in the significantly larger number of people able to afford grandiose second or third homes. Many formerly rural regions of the country are becoming elite exurbs—like parts of California’s Marin, Napa, Sonoma, and Mendocino counties, but also Cape Cod, eastern Long Island, the Berkshires, areas around ski resorts throughout the Rocky Mountains, and long stretches of ocean and lake coastline. Hidden by the exurban house’s designed encounter with landscape is its dubious battle with the gray boundlessness of the metropolis. America’s economy of sprawl now spews forth estate escapes, vast acreages of land sequestered into private preserves, utopias of the privileged individual. Inviting the sounds and sights of nature, yet not of the public, the exurban house represents a mass movement of affluent Americans away from the mass culture they themselves produce and control.  

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