It wasn’t just that they wanted a place to grow old in, here among the pines and firs of the famed Sea Ranch community in Northern California. David Ross and his husband, Mark Dutcher, wanted a place to grow old with them—a house that would bear, with unfussy equanimity, the various marks of its making and remaking and maturation.

“There’s a lot of ‘finish fetish’ with architects,” says David, an architect himself and director of design at Frederick Fisher and Partners in Los Angeles, where he and Mark live part of the year. “There’s a tendency that, with whatever you create, it has to stand still and never age.”

That’s not the house they’ve built on a little footprint of 32 feet by 32 feet, along with a small studio for Mark, an artist, just a few steps away. Their single-story home, unassuming in the earthy black asphalt of its shingle exterior and its plan of four equal-size rooms that form a continuous loop, is a monument to dynamism, contingency, and transience. Here, the couple explain how they created a house that, in David’s words, is “forever moving.”

A Lot to Love

Mark: The lot came with some limitations that we worked with rather than fought against.
David: There’s a maximum height—you can only go sixteen feet tall where we are.
Mark: And there’s a view corridor of the sunset, so there was only one place to put the house.
David: Our lot, even though it’s about two-thirds of an acre, seems larger because we’re surrounded by Sea Ranch’s commons.

No Dead Ends

David: A big part of the design was making sure there weren’t any dead ends in the house.
Mark: It’s a small space. We thought, How do we make it so we’re not bored? How do we make it enough for us? If you had dead ends, you’d feel trapped. We wanted to be able to keep moving through the home.
David: Each of the openings between the spaces is separated by a plywood sliding door.
Mark: You can actually change the shape of a room by having it all the way open or closed.

Room for Living

David: All four spaces are identical in size, but each has a different function: living, cooking, bathing, and sleeping.
Mark: The idea is that, in each room, there’s an object in the center for its function. The dining space has the table in the middle of the room. In the bathing area, it’s the shower. For the living area, the fireplace. In the sleeping space, the bed is in the center.

“We’re allowing the house to age and change. It’s a place for experimentation.”
—Mark Dutcher, resident

Light and Space

Mark: We gave each room its own light personality.
David: When the sun rises above the trees, it hits our bathroom first with skylights above the shower and the toilet. We were interested in how light moves around from different directions.
Mark: And even in how it reflects off the floor.
David: The shower has the least expensive tile in a high-gloss white. I’ve spent countless hours with clients looking at high-end options—they’re all beautiful, but you just go around and around. I said, “I want a shower that’s more about light and experience than anything else.” Then I wanted to make sure that, as the sun is rising, the dining space is really the brightest it can be, because it’s the first room you spend time in, for coffee and breakfast.

The New Dark House

David: The house is all black, and we thought of it as a shadow in the landscape. I wanted it to be just liquid, like it was dipped in asphalt shingles and then pulled out. There’s a concrete wall, but it’s there to support the earth. We wanted the house to be in the earth, not on it. Some homes out here have black exteriors, and they glisten. Our house disappears.

Project Credits:

Architect of Record: Frederick Fisher and Partners / @frederickfisherandpartners

Builder/General Contractor: Empire Contracting, Inc.

Civil Engineer: Dimensions 4 Engineering

Cabinetry: Redraw Inc.

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