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House of Horns by WOJR
With a stunning roofline comprising crests and troughs, House of Horns boldly asserts its presence in its rugged California locale.
Among the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains in California, a peculiar volume is set within the rugged topography. House of Horns – so named for the composition of crests and troughs of its striking roof form – exists as a paradox, at once a sympathetic addition to the context and a bold presence in the landscape. Crafted by WOJR, House of Horns is a response to the idea of the home as a world in and of itself, manifest as a collection of experiential components.
“The house was a unique opportunity to think through every scale of a project at once, an opportunity to make a world,” says John Todd, principal at WOJR. Todd expands on this idea with the suggestion that the architecture of this family home is defined by a series of smaller projects brought together to define the larger. The design process, he says, was an exploration of atmosphere, imbued with an analysis of the experience of space, scale and proportion, the culmination of which is a building of richly interwoven qualities of light and shadow, texture and tone, edges and seams. Todd speaks poetically about the deeply considered narratives and rituals of habitation and the implications for making space within the home. The design, he says, “is at once an architectural prompt and also a cinematic prompt … the precise control of the architecture produces new and interesting opportunities for lives to unfold within.”
The ambition for the project began in the humble ruins of a Spanish colonial-style building inherited by the client as a part of the Los Altos site. “They hoped we might be able to transform their inherited house into something new and fundamentally different.” Although the abandoned building was largely removed, some significant elements – such as the foundations – were retained as prompts for the design response. Order, structure and rhythm were drawn from the natural and artificial features of the landscape and informed the interior spatial strategy.
The first response was a restorative one: returning the hillside to a wild state by burying the lower level of the house. Above this almost subterranean collection of spaces, the building appears as a single-storey volume with seamless connectivity to the landscape at its edges. Todd describes the interior as a sort of dichotomy of spaces by virtue of these polarised levels: “The house would now become two disconnected worlds.” The lower level, comprising bedrooms, a media room, storage and a cave-like space for bathing – a small pool presided by a large stone ovoid column from Quarra Stone – is punctuated by considered apertures reconnecting the interior spaces to exterior courtyards and gardenscapes created with horticulturist Greenstar. Above these chambers, the main level holds a large and singular gathering space for hosting living activities, while additional bedroom suites anchor the north and south ends of the plan.
It is perhaps at this primary level that the ‘projects within the project’ are most present in the experience of House of Horns. A datum line traces a separation of materials around the perimeter of the spaces; much like the two levels of the building are juxtaposed at the macro scale, so too is the material palette at the micro scale. Above the datum, the wall and ceiling volumes are composed of inverted elliptical vaults lined in a soft, natural timber peeling away to reveal considered skylights and clerestory windows casting both dappled and direct light into the large room. Below, a terrazzo floor finish from Marvelous Marble Design wraps up into a structured wall panelling, the order of which is broken with moments of artistic whimsy; solid blocks of Danby marble carved into seemingly impossible organic volumes. Holding the centre of the building, a monolithic fireplace splits the open space into smaller zones.
The elliptical ceiling vaults of the interior translate to the exterior language, recognisable in the sculptural gestures of the roof plane, which define much of the silhouette of the house. Todd explains that the titular horns articulate the project as a concept and the horn as an instrument. “The house would be an assemblage of instruments tuned to capture the cycles of the day, of the seasons, the changing light, the changing growth and decay … and the changing weather; foggy mornings, sunny afternoons, golden dusk.”
A curated material palette of muted textures and tones is calibrated to complement the layered context of native vegetation and rich atmospheric qualities. Moments of raw concrete are sculpted as organic insertions into the topography – alluding to the cavern-like interior spaces – a landscape atop which a dark timber box rests as a canvas for a meadow of wild grasses and flowers at the perimeter. The array of horns, finished in a metal cladding of a similar tone to the timber, rise and fall across the crown of the building. “A precisely tuned instrument to experience the world around.”
House of Horns is a testament to the collective effort of many collaborators committed to a shared vision. “It is fundamentally a dialogue,” says Todd, celebrating the success of a system of trust and openness between client, contractor and architect, of shared learning and expertise in service to the aspirational design intent of many. “It is a fundamental collaboration between everyone … to test together the limits of what is possible.”
Architecture, interior and landscape design by WOJR. Build by Paragon Custom Builders. Structural engineering by FWCSE. Mechanical, plumbing and sustainability engineering by Monterey Energy Group. Furniture by Kylle Sebree Studio. Kitchen by Henrybuilt. Metalwork by Sun Valley Bronze and De Vincenzi. Lighting by O- LLC.
