Tour The Historic Sea Ranch Home of an Architect-Artist Couple
By: Andrew Sessa
Original Article Published by Architectural Digest
Anytime an architect designs his or her own home, it’s something of a love story. But the tale of this house feels especially romantic—and not just because of the residence’s enchanting setting in a wooded, oceanview enclave at the Sea Ranch, the celebrated mid-20th-century, ecologically minded planned community on the Northern California coast.
Set amid trees in the coastal Northern California’s iconic mid-20th-century Sea Ranch community, the cedar-shingled home of Los Angeles–based architect David Ross and his longtime partner, painter Mark Dutcher, celebrates the enclave’s modernist, ecologically minded, utopian sensibility, as well as the couple’s own way of living.
Los Angeles–based architect David Ross and his longtime partner, painter Mark Dutcher, had been visiting Sea Ranch together for nearly two decades before they found a place to call their own there. A Sea Ranch trip, in fact, was one of their earliest getaways: A bit after they began dating, Dutcher brought Ross here for the first time, inviting his new boyfriend along on an annual Labor Day trip he’d been making with friends for years.
“I fell in love with the Sea Ranch,” Ross says of that weekend, pointing to the destination’s natural setting on the craggy coast and its aesthetic pedigree, a collaboration between landscape architect Lawrence Halprin; graphic designer Barbara Stauffacher Solomon; and different architects, including William Turnbull, Jr. and Charles Moore, dean of Yale’s School of Architecture from 1965 to 1970. “It’s a utopia that was created by talented, artistic people.” Over the course of their stay that Labor Day Weekend, “I fell in love with Mark too,” Ross continues. “And even two decades ago, I knew we’d end up with something here. I just didn’t know what.”
What they ended up with, it turns out, has an impressive aesthetic pedigree of its own. Built in 1980 and owned for nearly 40 years by LA architect Martin Gelber, the house—which the couple bought in 2018, after two years of looking—boasts a design based closely on a Turnbull original. His angular, largely open-plan, two-story designs for the Sea Ranch feature weathered cedar shingle siding and highly slanted roof lines meant to help them disappear into their mostly unspoiled natural surroundings.
“Sea Ranch is unique among planned communities because it’s all about the landscape—and then there happens to be architecture,” says Ross, a partner in the firm Frederick Fisher & Partners, where he leads residential design. Ross and Dutcher’s house, accessed on foot down a wooded path, felt like it had a particularly back-to-the-land sensibility. Vehicles are stowed yards away and out of sight in a “car barn” designed by Turnbull himself—“The idea is you park your car there and leave the city behind,” Dutcher notes.
The couple’s scheme for their new home, realized largely during pandemic lockdowns, celebrates the surrounding geography. “Our starting point was that 1970s back-to-the land movement in Northern California,” Dutcher says—as well as their own architect-artist relationship. It also honors longtime owner Gelber and his vision for the house.
As the pair set about renovating, designing, and decorating, they sought to help the house become the best version of itself, in a way that restored, respected, and slightly riffed on what had come before, while also reflecting their own life together. Ross says he spent a lot of time thinking about what the original designers and previous owners “would have done if they were still alive. I didn’t want to allow my own ego to take over and say, ‘I could do this better.’” When they went to build a new deck, for example, they modeled it off the one Gelber had designed, extending it out just barely. And then they continued the redwood decking inside as interior flooring. “No one uses it [for flooring]—it’s very soft, and has huge gaps,” Ross says, “but that’s what the deck was, and we wanted to bring that in.”
Rather than putting in the contemporary kitchen of their dreams, they kept the original maple cabinets but got new linoleum to replace the old. And, since Sea Ranch houses are known for their built-in furniture, they installed some—the living room’s long sofa with modular cushions and an integrated side table—using clear cedar to contrast ever so slightly with the knotty cedar that clads many of the interior walls of the home and most dwellings here. They replaced the original stove (“It would have burnt the whole house down,” Ross says) with a Morso fireplace that looks as if it could have always been there. Ross designed the large, rectangular, locally forged steel surround with the same proportions as the Golden Ratio, a nod to how Mark Rothko, a favorite artist of his, determined the measurements of his canvases. For the hearth tiles, they went to the original Heath Ceramics in Sausalito, just north of San Francisco. “Charles Moore would go visit Edith Heath, and the only tile he’d buy would be seconds,” less-than-perfect product sold at a discount. “So we bought seconds too.”
The house is full of little stories like these, known only to the couple—the iconic Enzo Mari kit chairs Ross crafted by hand on sight during the pandemic; the artworks Dutcher made here mid-lockdown using house paint from the local hardware store, Sea Ranch Supply, because that was all that was open; the Olivetti typewriter on the coffee table in the library-like loft that Ross says was one of the first birthday gifts he gave to Dutcher. Which is not to say they agreed on every aesthetic inflection point. “We each have strong ideas about design,” Dutcher says. “But we come together—we have to— to make decisions on what we collect. I’ve always enjoyed that, me an artist, David an architect. He’s more Donald Judd minimalism. I’m more color and texture.”
Where these two tendencies meet, Ross continues, is where their joint aesthetic lives. “It’s a nice conversation to have,” Dutcher concludes.
