When Deborah Oropallo and Michael Goldin began plotting a move from Berkeley, California, to a more bucolic setting in the late aughts, they envisioned open land, a place for Deborah’s art studio and Michael’s design and fabrication shop, and an opportunity to grow and raise their own food. Veterans of two repurposed mixed-used city spaces—a machine shop and a brass foundry—the couple and their two kids were itching for country life.

In 2010, after prices proved prohibitive on other properties in rural Northern California, Deborah and Michael got wind of a 14-acre site closer to home, in unincorporated Novato in Marin County, that had languished on the market, and they hastened to check it out. Hopping the fence for a closer look, the two were greeted by what appeared to be a scene from a fairy tale in which time stands still. An overgrown thicket surrounded a concrete building that was open to the elements, and the landscape was dotted with tools dropped six years prior when construction came to an abrupt halt.

“It was like stumbling into an Italian hill town, with fog rising over the hills and swirling around this beautiful ruin of a building,” recalls Michael. The 4,000-square-foot structure was the intended three-car garage, basement, and foundation for a projected 13,000-square-foot ersatz castle dubbed Le Château, whose plans included a medieval-style moat. The stoppage was not due to the usual culprits in the American housing market (permitting issues, burst real estate bubble, recession, developer’s speculation) but to the owner’s conviction on embezzlement charges and subsequent removal to a different kind of big house. Prospective buyers had balked at finishing the house as planned and knew that removing the 1,000-plus yards of concrete would cost a fortune. But for Deborah and Michael, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

“You never find a foundation like that just sitting around,” says Michael. “The owner spent well over a million dollars just on that and the site work, which we never could have afforded.” Citing Regency architect John Soane, who considered his own house a place to experiment, Michael (who has a graduate degree in architecture from UC Berkeley) was game to transform the abandoned remains into a family home. “I love projects with good bones that I can riff on rather than starting from the ground up,” he says.

During the eight years it took to secure a new building permit, the family carved out a living space in Michael’s Berkeley design studio, with rugs hung as room dividers, then moved to an Airstream and assorted outbuildings on the four-acre farm they purchased adjacent to the new property—where Michael raises sheep, pigs, goats, chickens, and dairy cows. (His Comté cheese is especially tasty.) It took so long, in part, because the county was flummoxed about how to repermit a project that had sat dormant. (It was finally labeled a renovation.) During this time, the couple hosted dinners and parties in the empty space, alongside a colony of bats and nesting birds, and came to love the sounds of chirping and rain dripping through the then-open stairway—aural details they wanted to preserve.

Michael used what would have been the less sought-out rooms of the originally planned house for the entirety of theirs. A former chef, he sited the large kitchen in the erstwhile garage space while laying out the guest room, office, bathroom, living room, and game room in what would have been the underground dog-washing room, laundry, gym, wine cellar, and HVAC closet and inserting windows and skylights for light and air. What are now guest rooms were designated as bedrooms for the couple’s kids, who grew up and moved out before the project was done. Not wanting the house to feel too cohesive or enclosed, Michael cut an opening in one concrete wall and turned what he’d earmarked as the main bedroom into an aviary and inside-outside koi pond. He then placed the main bedroom on the roof, completing its enclosure with rammed-earth bricks that match the raw quality of the concrete.

Throughout, Michael and Deborah opted for materials that would age honestly, eschewing paint and slick surfaces for thick, unfinished ones such as wood and marble “that can handle a nick here and a spilled glass of wine there,” says Michael, who designed and built many of the furnishings. Although he followed the original plans for plumbing and electrical, the HVAC was scrapped. Radiant heat warms most of the house, and the 12-inch walls keep things cool when temperatures soar. The lower pond offers fire mitigation while helping temper warm air that flows into the house—and adding a musical, aquatic trickle.

Just outside the upstairs bedroom, a large patio is shaded by a brise-soleil made from frameless solar panels. Birds now nest and chirp in ivy planted against the wall, and at night the relocated bats cling to the open-air ceiling. Adding to the 100 olive trees the previous owner put in, the couple have planted an orchard and a terraced kitchen garden. Gazing out across the land, as deer inspect the fruit trees and hawks swoop overhead, one has no inkling that suburbia is but a few minutes away.

“When I talked to an engineer, he said this foundation could have supported an eight-story structure above it.”
—Michael Goldin, designer and resident

By any measure, Michael and Deborah’s subterranean home sits more lightly and elegantly in the landscape than the mansion it replaced (and the supersize houses being erected nearby). While not a small house by any measure, it is one that makes inventive use of all the nooks and crannies left behind—and then some. And Deborah is ready to stay for good. “We’ve been doing this thing—design a project and move on—for nearly 30 years,” she says. “Now, I just want to stay put and make art.” To which Michael laughs and adds, “Well, we’ll see.”

Project Credits:

Architecture: Alison Maloney and Michael Goldin

Structural Engineering: Mar Structural Design

Civil Engineering: LTD Engineering

Lighting Design: Light Express

—

Head back to the November/December 2022 issue homepage