This video is brought to you by ‘10’,
our debut hardcover book celebrating 10 Issues of The Local Project.
Use the code BOOK5 at check-out for a 5 per cent discount.
When I come into this house, I feel the space of it and I feel this strength and
power of these round shapes and how they frame the bay and Mount Tam [Tamalpais].
I'm Craig Steely, I'm the architect of the Sausalito House Boat.
So the Sausalito House Boat is located just North of San
Francisco in Sausalito in a house boat community.
In World War II they built a lot of liberty ships here and after the war
it was all abandoned and artists and beatniks and hippies moved in and started living on the boats,
building houses, making a kind of an amazing in community.
So when I first talked to Hannah she was looking for something that's really spatial inside,
typically a lot of the house boats they were trying to crush a house into a boat and it
seemed like just not the way to go about it it seemed like really to think about the dock,
think about the ocean, think about the views, think about the bay and how to
connect to all those, and how to connect sort of the interior space to the outdoor space.
When Hannah and I first looked at the lot, there was a kind of a sinking wooden barge on
the spot but you know one of the things that really interested us was the history of it,
of the community, of artists, of bohemians living together and so
we really wanted to sort of position this house boat in a framework of those older,
more sculptural ,more artistic, more interesting spaces to be in. You know
as opposed to these suburban Tuscan villas that you see popping up around the docks now.
So entering this place you come down the dock and come across a big gangplank, from there you look
down into a garden or as you walk in you look down into the living space that's sort of set
a little bit lower, but from that upper space, you can walk into the primary bedroom which is a kind
of like a long space that has a bathroom, shower, tub and then you step up into that into sort of a
sleeping birth that sort of has a view over the whole living space looking out towards the view.
From the living level you step down into the kitchen, that's a 30 inches below the
living space and then you walk down again into bedrooms and a garden that are at the lower level.
So I think the one thing that sort of sets this houseboat apart from other houseboats are the use
of layers keeping a big open volume, with these circles on each side and having these layers that
you walk through it and you sort of experience the views from these different layers and levels.
One thing we've done too when we start talking about materials instead of using
sheetrock the entire interior is clad and painted slats and you see that sort of
like coming through you know the whole house where the layers kind of dissolve into other
layers like where the kitchen is or the the bedroom birth is, where the entry stairs are.
And the other thing we've done too is I think in terms of materiality we've kept the palette
really simple just to sort of really focus on on the greens of Mount Tam in the distance,
the blue of the water, so really the house feels like a viewfinder where you're looking through
these big shapes at what's happening out there and there's not a lot of visual distractions in sight.
So the houseboat is right in Richardson Bay and with that comes everything at living on
the water is things rust, we do a lot of projects in Hawaii so we're pretty well versed in just how
corrosive like living on the ocean can be, so we took a lot of that into account here the exterior
is a hardie board product we actually used old redwood that came off of another project we're
doing in San Francisco, actually they said the redwood is probably like well over 100 years old,
we didn't put any finish or anything on it and it's holding up so solid and so well.
One of the most satisfying things about about the projects that we do
and in particular this houseboat, is seeing how Hannah's using it,
you know it's great working on a house and then getting to be able to see it used.
Well I have to say I have two favorite parts one is the entry sequence,
coming off the deck onto that ramp, the other would be walking through the house
towards Mount Tam, towards the bay that always feels really magical.
This video is brought to you by ‘10’,
our debut hardcover book celebrating 10 Issues of The Local Project.
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