In 2017, lawyer Hanna Bui, who had been living and working in Silicon Valley for 20 years, sought a change of pace from suburbia. Her son was off to college, and she longed to live close to water.

“I love to water-ski. I love the water. Water makes me happy,” Hanna says. The setting brings up some harder feelings as well, related to struggles of her childhood. In 1979, her family made a harrowing escape from Vietnam. They fled in a boat that took them—stripped by pirates of their belongings—to a coastal village in Thailand, where, for a short while, before the family found refuge in San Francisco, she had the chance to be a carefree teen, wading at the beach.

To regain that feeling, she rented a houseboat in Sausalito’s Richardson Bay for a weekend. In the mornings, the pageant of sea creatures at her doorstep mesmerized her, and soon she decided to purchase the houseboat.

The community around her new home included aging hippies, quirky artists, and well-heeled newcomers who, “like me, don’t want big houses,” Hanna says. “In a suburb you drive into your garage and don’t know the neighbors. Here, you talk to everyone. We know each other well. Neighbors paddle over in boats to say hi. By the water, our lives become intertwined during both good and bad weather, and that’s beautiful.”

But she still wanted to build something new. One day, looking online for floating house architects, she found a rendering of a houseboat with a moon gate entryway by San Francisco architect Craig Steely. The traditional Chinese circular opening, which symbolizes birth and renewal, resonated with her. Besides, Steely’s moon gate also exhibited the artful virtuosity of the hippie dwellings that made the area famous. Hanna messaged him, and he was keen to develop the idea for her.

“I had sketched something that was more boat-like than house-like, with views from the front dock to the bay,” Steely says. The home’s open-plan interior then evolved as the architect observed what didn’t work in conventional houseboats, which often have rooms below the dockline that tend to get moldy. However, Hanna’s berth was just not wide enough for his design to work.

So, in 2019, she found and purchased another nearby berth that could accommodate a 24-foot-wide barge, and the architect engaged legendary local barge builder Ian Moody, an Australian native who had been building concrete barges for floating homes in Sausalito for decades. At his World War II–era dry dock, where Liberty ships were once made, Moody fashioned the 6-foot-tall, 24-by-46-foot bathtub-like concrete raft atop which Hanna’s modern wood-frame houseboat would rise. But in 2021, just as San Francisco contractor Mark Forsythe was finishing the house at Moody’s dry dock, Moody suddenly died. And with him went the know-how to launch the completed barge—#402—into the bay.

“It feels like you are on the main steering deck of a ship from which you can look at the bow. The bed loft feels like a crow’s nest, and the levels and layering create an interior landscape.”
—Craig Steely, architect

With the agility of the seasoned surfer and sailor that Steely and Forsythe, respectively, are, the architect and builder improvised. When they were ready to launch the 1,355-square-foot, 250,000-pound houseboat off the sled it was built on, they used jacks to push the sled into the bay and waited for the rising tide to float the house free. Then, with the help of a tugboat crew, they gingerly towed it to Hanna’s berth.

“It was really epic!” Steely says. A crowd of dockside neighbors cheered them on. Few among them had witnessed a houseboat so unusual since the ’50s and ’60s, when artists such as Jean Varda took over abandoned shipyards and made homes out of decommissioned ferryboats. In that sense, Hanna’s new house, with its distinctive gateway, is a nod to Bay Area history.

“The round gate is powerful and hearkens back to Varda’s time, when big geometric boat shapes—not houses—prevailed,” Steely says. “I wanted that to be legible.” He also wanted Hanna’s interior spaces to overlap “vertically and horizontally,” as they do in boats, he explains. “I wanted it to feel like the steering deck of a ship looking over the bow, with a crow’s nest bedroom, a galley kitchen, and a hold for storage below deck.”

In keeping with the nautical conceit, a stepped aluminum-and-ipe gangplank rises from the dock to the mouth of the recycled redwood moon gate and the entry porch. The front door opens into a skylighted foyer with a round crimson-redcoat closet Steely’s firm designed. To the left, a hallway and steps lead up to the primary bedroom, which has views of Mount Tamalpais and the bay through an enormous round window in the back wall. The window is the entry gate’s twin and glows like a rising moon when viewed from the water at night.

Hanna’s home took some getting used to. Different floor levels rather than partitions and doors demarcate spaces that do double duty. “The many stairs seemed overwhelming during the move in,” she recalls. But now that she has learned to live with them, she easily comes down from her aerie, through the living spaces to a demilune back deck and down to a floating raft for a spontaneous swim or around of paddling or water-skiing with her Boston Whaler docked outside. And “even though my stove is too small for serious cooking, I love to cook for friends,” she says. “The open kitchen has a gorgeous view, and my guests sit around me while I work.”

This houseboat has also brought Hanna another unexpected dividend. As a refugee in San Francisco she had to learn English, work hard at school, and help the family. “I never had time to go play,” she says. “But now in this house on the water, I can finally have fun. I can be a child again.”

Project Credits:

Architect of Record: Craig Steely Architecture / @craigsteely

Builder/General Contractor: Forsythe General Contractors

Structural Engineer: Rye Jorgensen

Landscape, Interior, and Lighting Design: Craig Steely Architecture

Cabinetry and Custom Furniture: Craig Steely Architecture

Furniture Fabrication: Josh Podoll / @chopwood.co

—

Head back to the November/December 2022 issue homepage

Richard Barnes

Articles