Sea Cliff

Richard makes houses as if people were cats. Modernist boxes, with clean, straight, strong lines, yes. But not so dour, so severe, so confrontational as the prescribed norm. Elegant and spare, but only to a degree. Never monumental for its own sake—the cardinal sin of the profession in the late 20th century. When you walk into one of his houses you know you are invited. The massing, the interior spaces, never cater to a central authority or hierarchy, to the logic of the architect’s grand plan. Instead, he has made a house where any number of lives can be led,  simultaneously, in multiple spaces, sized just for you. 

The kitchen is always at the center, because he knew (a fine and generous chef himself) that that is where people prefer to gather, and so, that is where good things begin to happen. Here, there, everywhere, are places to sit, to read, to sleep, to have conversations: nooks, ledges, and benches, with beckoning cushions, to say nothing of the separate privacy of the bedrooms. Each has its own relationship with direction and light, each is enough. A uniformly soft, warm light suffuses, through butted glass corners, venetian blinds, skylights, high expanses of wall reflecting sunlight from above. Warm, tactile materials reach up from the floor to touch the flat masonry—tile, rough stucco, wood, fabrics. Along with the sliding, asymmetrical massing of the box-forms, these show a kinship with the warmth of the Spanish tradition in Southern California and the best of Mexican Modernism of the time (for example Barragan), and not the cold machine aesthetic of the American version en vogue. And like them, his houses always are wrapped in a garden, with each garden-space intimately embracing each house-space—each, again, sized and set just enough apart, just right for a person or two to pursue their own lines of pursuit. Eucalyptus, jacarandas, guavas, flax, echium, lavender—plant architectures to complement his own.

Seacliff, to me, was the most successful, because the most subtle. Right on the water, it had to honor the ocean above else—and it does. Most beach houses are full frontal: look at this. But at Seacliff, Richard simultaneously made spaces apart, to the side, oblique; spaces that don’t depend on the water to give purpose: for cooking, eating, sitting in front of the fire, soaking in the hottub, reading a book, or curling up in the filtered sun, like a cat. 

— Wade Graham