Architectural Record 2015-04

64
ARCHITECTURAL RECORD APRIL 2015 IN FOCUS THE SEA RANCH AT 50
bitter state-wide controversy over beach access. Amazingly,
when the Sea Ranch was being planned in the early 1960s,
only 100 miles of California’s 1,300-mile-long coastline was
accessible to the public, and environmentalists feared this
private patch of paradise would block beach access. Years of
legislative and court battles put a damper on most new
development here. By the time the issue was finally resolved
in 1981—and public trails were cut through the property down
to the shore—land values had soared. The Oceanic company
sold out, and future development tended to stray from
the Halprin concept of modest houses clustered together.
Today, there are about 1,800 houses, and many of the
newer ones barely adhere to the letter, much less the spirit,
of the covenants. Yes, they may be clad in gray wood, but
some are the faux light gray that comes from paint, not time
LIMITED PARTNERSHIP Esherick’s own modest, ingenious house (top);
a page from ARCHITECTURAL RECORD’s report on the Sea Ranch in 1965,
with another Esherick house (bottom); a new house by Norman Millar
and Judith Sheine (above) uses concrete and Cor-Ten but embraces the
spirit of the place.
and weather, and many are large and ungainly.
Yet the architect Donlyn Lyndon, 79, who lives part-time
at the Sea Ranch, is an active keeper of the flame; so are
other homeowners in the Sea Ranch Association, which
holds democratic Halprin-style workshops about the future
of the place (not necessarily with dancing on the beach).
Lyndon has continued to design houses that embody what
he and his colleagues intended in scale and craftsmanship.
Just as heartening is an innovative new dwelling that doesn’t
faithfully comply with the dominant material palette but is
simply good architecture: a handsome house designed by
Norman Millar and Judith Sheine that fits beautifully into
its cliffside site, clad in concrete and Cor-Ten.
Despite the imperfections of its evolution over half a
century, the influence of the Sea Ranch is unmistakable.
Long before the current popularity of vernacular modernism
and the push for sustainable architecture, the houses
and planning here exemplified the power of design inspired
by place. Brian Mackay Lyons, the award-winning Nova
Scotia–based architect, who worked for Charles Moore from
1980 to ’82, was a frequent visitor in those days. “Our work
wouldn’t be possible without the Sea Ranch,” he says. And
the land-management plan that record extolled in 1965 as
“dynamic conservation” was far ahead of its time. Though
mankind’s footprint on the land has occasionally been
clumsy, the beauty of the wild acres of meadows and forests,
the sea and the sky, triumph over all. ■
PHOTOGRAPHY: © JIM ALINDER (OPPOSITE, 2, AND THIS PAGE, TOP); JUDITH SHEINE (MIDDLE); ARCHITECTURAL RECORD (BOTTOM)