Paradox House.

The clients for this new 4,500 SF home in Sonoma, California’s wine country are a wonderful paradox as a couple: one raised in Iran and the other in South Africa; one fiery, one cooler; one drawn to order, the other to serendipity; one operating in shades of grey, the other in bold colors.

Out of these fascinating character dialectics came opposed intuitions for the siting and design of the home: one wanted a multistory structure high above the ground to capture distant mountain views, the other gravitated towards a single-story firmly grounded in the landscape. One’s priority was a formal lawn and a pool to plunge into from their bedrooms, while the other’s was meandering paths through smaller gardens and outdoor spaces.

Given these often-contradictory impulses, it might have been tempting to ameliorate these tensions by mediating between them. Yet, the Paradox House attempts to find fodder in the creative power of paradoxical thinking by reveling in the contradictions. Niel’s Bohr’s dictum “How wonderful that we have met with a paradox! Now we have some hope of making progress,” became our leitmotif for design.

The site itself is something of a geological paradox –rocky surface debris obscures a sheet of groundwater flowing over expansive volcanic bedrock; a seemingly rugged landscape to build on, yet in actuality requiring a system of deep drilled piers and grade beams to create a new platform for construction independent of the land. Because of this, the client’s paradoxical desire to sit firmly on the ground while also hovering above it became moot from a cost and technical perspective; in either case, we needed to first create our own new stable ground.

This allowed for a firmly grounded structure at the high ground of the rear that naturally becomes a floating one-story bedroom wing with a grotto underneath as the land slopes away. The mountains of salvaged rocks excavated for the piers then become riprap banks and site walls to stabilize the slopes, emerging once again as cairn-shaped landforms from which the grotto’s cruciform columns emerge. To intensify the counter-intuitive placement of the pool at the higher level, an eight-foot high and sixty-foot-long infinity edge becomes a cooling water feature for the grotto below.

On the interior, we also leaned into the contradictions of the client’s impulses. We punctuated the primary palette of grey and black with pops of intense chartreuse and blue. An entry folly holds one client’s geode collection in a ‘garden’ under a curious skylight –an outer opening with baffled light holds an inner hanging volume with sharply focused natural light, intensified with a vibrantly color interior. This odd daylit garden pairs with an evening-focused room divider –a fireplace below, a skylit bar-cabinet above painted deep blue, and a hidden media center on the backside.

The home incorporates passive infrastructure through a host of strategies including solar panels, an on-site well and septic system, a greywater catchment system for irrigation and radiant floor, all of which allow for full off grid capabilities.