There’s nowhere quite like Carmel-by-the-Sea on California’s Monterey Peninsula, with its wind-swept cypress trees and grassy dunes. The White Sands residence, built paces from the water, embraces it fully. But you don’t have to look outside to experience the area’s signature quartz-rich, milky-toned beaches for which the house is named.

Forming the spine of the glass-wrapped home is a long wall clad with rammed-earth panels, fabricated with sand harvested from the building site. “We were looking for a way to bring the tactility and the sensory quality of the beach into the house so that we didn’t feel like we were keeping the beach out, but rather threading it throughout,” explains architect Jess Field, co-founder of Palo Alto, California, firm Field Architecture with his father, Stan. “Everything else cues off of that.”

Before designing the retreat, the father and son noticed that many nearby houses were oriented east toward the street and treated the shore like a suburban backyard. But knowing that the owners, a family with three children and two dogs, eventually wanted to live here full time, creating a stronger connection with the beach felt important.

“We just looked at this and said, hold on a minute. This is the Pacific Ocean,” Jess recalls, chuckling. “My dad and I are both surfers. The sea is life, and here it kind of almost felt like an afterthought. We said to ourselves, first and foremost, we have to reorient the front to the back and the back to the front.’”

They also decided to angle the house’s west-facing façade to parallel its stretch of coastline. “We noticed that every time we stood at this location, we kept facing that way,” Jess says. “We thought maybe it was because of the framing between these big cypress trees on either side. It turned out, we were simply orienting ourselves toward the breaking surf.” Even though zoning restrictions, whether maximum height or limited overall volume, meant there wouldn’t be much flexibility to play with form, “we realized that all it really took was orienting toward the sea,” he adds.

Inside, the rammed-earth wall guides one from the entrance to the public areas that face the ocean. “We were looking for an organizing device that could separate out and draw a distinction between the private and the shared spaces of the home,” Jess explains. “That started to inspire us to actually think about a single wall, an element that would thread all the way from the beach side of the house to the street side, and one that could be constructed out of the same material as the dunes themselves.”

The sand panels were manufactured off-site in collaboration with the late rammed-earth expert David Easton, credited with reviving the technique in America during the 1970s. The finished product’s distinctive look comes from stacking layers of mixed sand and concrete. The top one is blue, evoking the sky. “Typical rammed earth looks a little more brown, and this has the colors of the beach,” Jess says. “It was complete harmony. It was unbelievable.”

A large skylight animates the wall by casting shadows, but it also allows the wall to absorb radiant heat that’s released over the course of the night, a way to passively heat the home in Carmel’s cool, breezy climate. The wall is framed with black steel, which also forms the tall doorways. Simple elegant limestone flooring turns upward where the wall meets the floor to provide a protective skirt for the rammed-earth panels.

When viewed from the beach, however, the home’s signature material isn’t the panels—it’s glass. Field Architecture used wraparound glazing to capture panoramic views framed by cypress trees. “Hanging out in the living area either inside or outside on the patio, you feel that connection to the ocean, and the serenity you get is just wonderful,” says one of the homeowners. “It’s our favorite part of the house.”

The open kitchen, situated in the home’s southeast corner near the entrance, acts as a junction. Positioned beside a breakfast nook with an adjacent outdoor patio, it fans out into the dining and living area to the west. “When you’re cooking, you face the ocean, so you’re not cut off from the view,” says the homeowner, adding that it’s “a cook’s kitchen,” with a dual-induction gas cooktop and plenty of counter space. “We don’t order out much, so that was really important to me,” they say.

On the street-facing side of the house, the primary suite extends outward to create views west through the glass. Field’s design also burrows down into the dune to create a light-well for a daylit basement family room and additional bedrooms. A small stairway leads up and over the grassy dunes, emphasizing the rising and falling coastal topography.

“We work with what's there, and we can shape that in a way that can form this kind of symbiotic relationship with its surroundings,” says Jess. “And there’s just endless opportunity that can come from that. We can look to our regional context for inspiration. That was hugely important here.”

More from Field Architecture:

A Barn-Inspired, Modern Retreat Is Knitted Into Napa Valley

A Silicon Valley Home Splits Around a Magnificent Blue Oak

Project Credits:

Architect of Record: Field Architecture

Builder: Stocker & Allaire

Structural Engineer: Strandberg Engineering

Civil Engineer: Benjamini Associates, Inc.

Mechanical Engineer: Monterey Energy Group

Landscape Design: Joni L. Janecki & Associates Inc.

Lighting Design: Eric Johnson Associates

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A California Retreat Has Walls Made Out of the Beach