Whispering Stones Residence by Swatt + Partners in Healdsburg

On a wooded site north of San Francisco, the project is on a knoll that offers views of the surrounding foothills and the valley below. As a result, Swatt + Partners decided to create a linear form that is made up of transparent and milling volumes clad in local materials to connect it with the northern Californian landscape.

“The underlying design philosophy was not to impose a structure onto the site that would require contorting the surrounding topography,” studio principal Robert Swatt told designboom. “The form recedes into the landscape.”

The three structures that make up the building are laid out linearly, connected through glass-floored bridges covered by volumes above. The blocks step up the incline and have large floor-to-ceiling windows that open onto terraces that allow for views of the hillside.

The windows have thin aluminium frames, while the rest of the facade is clad primarily in concrete, as well as Western Red Cedar and aluminium.

“We selected materials that would both naturally lift out of the ground such as concrete and those that are closest to the materials found in nature,” said Swatt.

Elements of the local landscape are integrated into the structure. At one end of the linear volume, an oak tree appears to be swallowed by the building, protruding through a hole in overhanging eaves.

“The two primary ways the house relates to its surroundings is in its preservation of the undisturbed gentle slopes of the land and trees that reach through openings made in the house, and through the numerous floor-to-ceiling glass openings that allow for natural light to penetrate the home’s interior.”

The interior materials include white oak for furnishing, as well as white walls for the display of the client’s private art collection – both artworks and natural objects. A small, raised, tile-clad pool and a circular sauna clad in wood sit above the living room, accessible through a circular staircase.

In the central volume, the black-tiled main pool is situated above the garage, which juts out of the hill into a small clearing, while the upper levels of the primary volume curve around, creating a triangular courtyard with an oak tree in the middle. Stone pathways around the property create different access points for each level of the house.

Local firm Bradanini & Associates was in charge of landscaping, which took into account the seven-year drought that has affected northern California and the intense precipitation that resulted from last winter’s thunderstorms there. As a result, “drought tolerant” plants such as gum trees, sedge and various grasses were used.

The landscape was continued by the landowners through a “substantial” reforestation plan that consisted of placing seedlings throughout the adjacent valley in a way that Swatt wrote “began the process of returning the landscape to a more natural condition – one that had most likely existed before much of the land was cleared for cattle grazing”.

Swatt + Partners was founded in 1975 and is based in Emeryville, California. Recent residential projects in the area include a home on a slope clad in limestone and a prefabricated home with ceilings close to the surrounding redwood trees near Sonoma County.

Architects in northern California have to contend with the challenging terrain and environmental factors most years, and some others have even taken cues from the topography in order to create a whole new form for an existing structure.