Big Sur, Calif.
Fougeron Architecture

Fougeron melds taut, linear forms and transparent planes with volumetric elements to create Big Sur House, an elegant weekend retreat

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	Click for slideshow; Photo © Richard Barnes
	Anne Fougeron, AIA, Principal
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Building a house in Big Sur has never been easy. When San Francisco–based Fougeron Architecture set out to erect a compact, 2,500-square-foot vacation retreat at the bottom of an inland canyon in northern California, the local zoning officials didn’t care that the house was small, or that you could hardly see it from any road, or even that the site was part of a property owners’ association. They didn’t want a house there, period, according to principal Anne Fougeron, AIA. So, she says, her firm had to go through a three-and-a-half year planning-approval process and meet 32 conditions before building.

Since the sun washes over the property primarily in the morning and early afternoon, when the mountains’ shadows begin to fall, Fougeron conceived of the house as an astringently linear glass-and-wood rectangle, which stretches 76 feet from east to west across the site. Each end of the bar-shaped structure accommodates bedrooms, with the public living spaces dominating the middle section.

Envisioned as a discrete object in the landscape, the two-story house features stuccoed masses, copper-clad walls, wood-louvered screens, and clear- and channel-glass planes that come together into a crisply attenuated, understated whole. A buttery yellow screen of cedar slats extends horizontally across the south entrance wall to shield the kitchen from the sun’s glare. At the back, along the north elevation, the living and dining areas’ glass walls open onto a cedar deck facing the creek. Copper clads the more opaque ends of the building, where bedrooms require privacy.

The visitor who approaches the louvered facade and enters at the house’s southeast corner via a small gangplank—leading into a long hall that skims past a bedroom, bath, and the kitchen—is hardly prepared for the fully glazed living and dining area that shoots up to a 23-foot height. The compression and release of space evokes the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright: Even the dining area, contained in its own volume, pushes out into the landscape.

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