This illustration shows the overview of the home. The entrance is seen at the bottom. The home is completely off the grid, running on solar panels for electricity and a backup generator when needed. There’s also a well and a septic field. And because there’s no fire department on the island, there’s a pump hooked up to seawater just in case.
And here’s the view looking back at the entrance gate. There’s a calculated symmetry to the design of the home, stemming from Holly’s love of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work and from decades of designing displays in her bookstores with symmetry in mind. The large madrona tree is a point of axis. “They wanted an idea of order in the wilderness,” Smith says. Pennsylvania bluestone steps lead to sandstone pavers and on to the front door.
The kitchen features rich, recycled stringy bark from an old factory in Footscray and recycled mountain ash from a house demolition in Kew, imbuing it with character that both defies the age of the extension and respects the age of the worker’s cottage.
Who lives here: This is a weekend home for BJ and Danielle Siegel and their son, Jules Location: Santa Rosa, California Size: The big box is 640 square feet (59.5 square meters); the small box is 450 square feet (41.8 square meters) Designer: Geoffrey Warner of Alchemy Architects
It’s a very minimalist house without a lot of storage, which wasn’t a requirement
The simple galley kitchen has Ikea cabinets with custom-designed fronts created from white oak flooring. Homeowner BJ Siegel built the tall dining table out of a black walnut tree that had fallen on the property.
This plan shows the layout of the rooms. The guest quarters are on the top left, the living spaces are in the middle, and the study and master bedroom are on the right. The two bottom structures are the storage shed and Paul’s woodshop.
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