Living the Dream

Perched on a high mountain ridge with Bay views and in the shadows of Mt. Tamalpais, a modern residential masterpiece by Jensen Architects. Architecture meets the art of living in this extraordinary contemporary home comprised of a plinth and pavilion structure nestled into the northern California nature, sitting amongst bold drifts of lively grasses, colorful native perennials, and wildflowers. The structure of the house mimics the surrounding oaks, with their limbs extending horizontally from solid trunks. The building core—a solid stack containing stairs and bathrooms—forms the "trunk," while the roof structure are the limbs. Here, though, discreet slender steel pipes support the outer ends of the roof, which cantilevers almost forty feet from the core, allowing the pavilion to float above the landscape beneath it. An array of sliding glass panels retracts completely into the home's core, dematerializing the structure into the native-oak-strewn ridge and drawing the surrounding grasses, perennials, and wildflowers into the rooms themselves. The result is a home where architecture and landscape align with elegant effect—a dwelling that grows from its ridge like the oaks around it, dissolving the boundary between the built and the natural.