By Barton Myers Associates, Inc
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@steel_book 020 8/9/04 5:14 PM Page 80 88 3 STEEL HOUSES CHAPTER NAME 88 @steel_book 020 8/9/04 5:14 PM Page 82 House and Studio at Toro Canyon Montecito, California Design/Completion 1997/1999 HOUSE AND Barton and Vicki Myers 40 acre mountain site Family residence of 6,000 square feet in 4 STUDIO AT structures; garage, guest house, main residence, and studio/archive Glass, steel, concrete, aluminum, water TORO CANYON, The House at Toro Canyon is a residence sited in a secluded mountain canyon in Montecito, with Montecito panoramic views of the ocean and the Channel Islands to the south and mountain peaks to the An interview with Barton Myers by Suzanne Myers north. A creek runs the length of the site, through native oaks and rich ochre sandstone, forming a 1 serene Southern California landscape. The siting strategy was to make a series of smaller, discrete Q: Can you talk about finding the site and how you originally decided to build a house in interventions, thus preserving and enhancing the Santa Barbara? natural landscape of the site. Barton Myers: Vicki and I were very happy living in the Hollywood Hills. We had an extraordinary, circa 1928 house there, with great views over Los Angeles and the Hollywood “To conserve the beauty of the landscape and save Bowl. But I wanted to do something myself, something new. It seemed like the timing was its trees, Myers...decided to put his studio at the good, and Vicki was very supportive of the idea. We had originally thought about building top of the steep slope, a guest house and garage something in Hawaii and had gone through the whole process of trying to find land there, below, and the main house on a level pad between. but we started thinking about the fact that it’s seven hours over, and we’d only get there a Lofty steel-framed pavilions have roll-up segmented couple of times a year, so it would have been a huge expenditure. Instead, we decided to glass doors opening onto terraces and roll-down look in Santa Barbara, a place we could really live and still work in Los Angeles. (Fig. 1) All of shutters to provide security when the owners are the houses I knew up here, particularly the George Washington Smith houses down in the away, to protect from brush fires, and screen the flats of Montecito, did a brilliant job of building walled gardens. When you’re in one of these sun. As an added safeguard and to insulate the gardens, the hedges are so high that you have no idea there’s anybody else around. You only interiors from the heat of summer, each flat roof see the mountains, or maybe a distant view of the ocean. We thought we would find one of serves as a shallow pool, containing water that is those kinds of sites, so I started thinking a lot about the idea of the wall and garden. I felt 2 re-circulated from uphill storage tanks. Nature that a lot of the contemporary architects here were too caught up in object-making, that conditions the air, and a lap pool runs along the their buildings were very introverted, sculptural, and had lost the connection between edge of the guest house roof. ” [Michael Webb, on house and garden which is so special to California. The Modern movement was so influenced the ‘Myers House’, in Brave New Houses: Adventures by Japanese architecture. The Frank Lloyd Wright houses, Schindler’s Kings Road house, in Southern California Living (2003)] had brilliant relationships to the outdoors. I was thinking of Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion and how to do that again in a new way. “The House at Toro Canyon is an ‘elegant warehouse’ in the tradition of Eames and early Barton Myers But the interesting sites tended to be high in the mountains, not in the flats where the houses. It builds upon the Southern California walled gardens were. (Fig. 2) When we found this site, I couldn’t believe it hadn’t sold. I was 3 tradition of seamless spatial integration of indoors so knocked out by it. One thing that was special was that the building platforms, the level and out and continues Barton Myers’ explorations in areas, are so contained by the walls of the canyon and the creek that your garden walls are steel housing in which industrial materials are used basically the mountainsides. (Fig. 3) It switches the relationship—the house becomes an out of context; an emphasis first developed with the object within the garden. Wolf House, and the earlier Myers Residence in Toronto.” [‘Barton Myers: 3 Steel Houses,’ exhibition Q: This site or area has particular concerns with fire risk. Was that something that you press release, University Art Museum, University of had encountered before? California, Santa Barbara (2001)] Barton Myers: Yes and no. Although Hollywood was a fire zone, it was not as dangerous as Toro Canyon. The elements that make this canyon beautiful also have a negative side: 83 @steel_book 020 8/9/04 5:14 PM Page 84 terrible threat of fire, erosion problems, unstable hills in many places, and earthquake. Q: How did you decide where to site the pavilions? These are real factors that you have to be very careful about. I approached the problem in a Barton Myers: The site is relatively steep—it’s probably a 20–25 percent grade—and there couple of ways. Since the Malibu and Laguna Beach fires, the codes have been tightened had been two pads partially leveled. It became apparent that you couldn’t do one big house up. I had also heard about a UCLA thesis on building in fire zones, which turned out to be structure. There is a height restriction here of 16 feet average from finished grade, so that very helpful. So, between looking at the new county requirements and the work at UCLA, meant you couldn’t stack a two or three-story house up here. And then I was interested in I had a good idea of what to do. First you have to reduce the amount of fuel. These canyons the idea that you could distribute the buildings among the trees. We’re in a forest of ancient burn at about 3000 degrees. You need to clear enough to reduce the heat to around 700–1000 oaks, but the oaks seem to have survived the earlier fires fairly well. The pavilion idea degrees. Steel deforms at about 1400 degrees. There’s a catch-22 there, because as you clear, allowed me to set the houses within the oak trees, and not take any out. (Fig. 6) if you’re not careful you can get into huge water run-off and erosion problems. Secondly, 4 you have to build out of non-combustible materials. You can use heavy timber. Wood is com- I liked the idea of an Adirondack camp: you could have the main house, with the living bustible, but heavy timber will burn and char, which kind of protects it. You have to have room, dining room, kitchen and the bedrooms isolated in separate buildings. The Santa sprinklers, and I even looked at having exterior sprinklers on the building, but found that Barbara code won’t allow you to do that exactly. You have to have a climate-controlled, wasn’t necessary. The codes encourage you to use highly reflective glass, but nobody wants heated connection from the living room/dining room/kitchen to the bedroom. That seemed to put mirror glass up here. It’s just wrong for the area. The house has to have smoke strange to me, because my favorite houses here are the old mission style homes, which had detectors, with notification to the fire department. On the large sites, you need to store wonderful courtyards and patios. You would go out of the living room along an open arcade water for fire fighting. Those were the basic things. (Fig. 4) to your bedroom. So what I did was to take those ideas and try to incorporate them in a strong way. First, we 5 When we discovered this extraordinary site, the original idea of high walls and gardens sort could reduce the fuel on the up-slope sides. We can’t touch the creek because that’s a of vanished. I’d been aware of Persian gardens, which had beautiful high pavilions within natural preserve. We hired a landscape consultant and worked out techniques to protect the garden, buildings which in the summer opened up, using big shade devices. I started from fire and erosion at the same time. For instance, the trees are widely spaced, so they thinking more about this as a model for objects within the garden. don’t burn like an orchard would. We used a lot of cactus, which stores water. We planted hedges of vetiver, a sterile grass, which stabilizes the hillside. On the lowest terrace, we put the garage and a detached guest house. (Fig. 7) It has a reflecting pond and lap pool on its roof. The garage is the only building that doesn’t have On the houses I obviously used steel, and wherever there were glass openings, I introduced water on it, and I wanted to use that as a terrace on the next level for the main house. The the rolling insulated fire shutter. The doors are manually operated, because of the risk of 6 studio, which sits on the highest point of the site, is a library and workspace, officially an power failure in a big fire.