House Tour: Inside A Historic Sea Ranch Home of an Architect-Artist Couple

Today we’re taking a rare peek inside the Northern Californian Sea Ranch home of architect David Ross and longtime partner, painter Mark Dutcher. It’s a tale of restoration, colour and romance…

The residence’s enchanting setting is found within a wooded, oceanview enclave at the Sea Ranch, the celebrated mid-20th-century, ecologically minded planned community on the Northern California coast. It’s here where the architect-artist couple decided to create their own utopia, calling in the expertise of an array of design professionals to make their vision a reality.

“I fell in love with the Sea Ranch,” Ross says, pointing to the destination’s natural setting on the craggy coast and its aesthetic pedigree, a collaboration between landscape architect Lawrence Halprin; graphic designer Barbara Stauffacher Solomon; and different architects, including William Turnbull, Jr. and Charles Moore, dean of Yale’s School of Architecture from 1965 to 1970. “It’s a utopia that was created by talented, artistic people.”

An ode to the past

As the pair set about renovating, designing, and decorating, they sought to help the house become the best version of itself, in a way that restored, respected and slightly riffed on what had come before, while also reflecting on their own life together. Ross says he spent a lot of time thinking about what the original designers and previous owners “would have done if they were still alive. I didn’t want to allow my own ego to take over and say, ‘I could do this better.’” When they went to build a new deck, for example, they modelled it off the one Gelber had designed, extending it out just barely. And then they continued the redwood decking inside as interior flooring. “No one uses it [for flooring]—it’s very soft, and has huge gaps,” Ross says, “but that’s what the deck was, and we wanted to bring that in.”

Rather than putting in the contemporary kitchen of their dreams, they kept the original maple cabinets but got new linoleum to replace the old. And, since Sea Ranch houses are known for their built-in furniture, they installed some—the living room’s long sofa with modular cushions and an integrated side table—using clear cedar to contrast ever so slightly with the knotty cedar that clads many of the interior walls of the home and most dwellings here.

Furthermore, they replaced the original stove (“It would have burnt the whole house down,” Ross says) with a Morso fireplace that looks as if it could have always been there. Ross designed the large, rectangular, locally forged steel surround with the same proportions as the Golden Ratio, a nod to how Mark Rothko, a favourite artist of his, determined the measurements of his canvases. For the hearth tiles, they went to the original Heath Ceramics in Sausalito, just north of San Francisco. “Charles Moore would go visit Edith Heath, and the only tile he’d buy would be seconds,” less-than-perfect product sold at a discount. “So we bought seconds too.”

A joint aesthetic

The house is full of little stories like these, known only to the couple—the iconic Enzo Mari kit chairs Ross crafted by hand on sight during the pandemic; the artworks Dutcher made here mid-lockdown using house paint from the local hardware store, Sea Ranch Supply, because that was all that was open; and the Olivetti typewriter on the coffee table in the library-like loft that Ross says was one of the first birthday gifts he gave to Dutcher.

Which is not to say they agreed on every aesthetic point. “We each have strong ideas about design,” Dutcher says. “But we come together—we have to— to make decisions on what we collect. I’ve always enjoyed that, me an artist, David an architect. He’s more Donald Judd minimalism. I’m more colour and texture.”

Where these two tendencies meet, Ross continues, is where their joint aesthetic lives. “It’s a nice conversation to have,” Dutcher concludes.