Studio Schicketanz Brings Sensitive, Sustainable Design to the Monterey Bay


“We like to have a seamless connection between concepts of sustainability and integrity of design—how it sits on the land if it’s new, and how it relates to the past if it’s a renovation,” says Schicketanz. The firm’s latest restoration and re-imagining of a rustic modern home by midcentury starchitect Henry Hill on the Monterey Peninsula is no exception. English born, Hill was an early pioneer of California modernism in the Bay Area.

The 1,957-square-foot house was Hill’s private weekend retreat before becoming his primary residence where, over the years, it served as testing ground for both the serious and more whimsical of his architectural imaginings. “It was Hill’s personal playground,” says Schicketanz. From the outside, the house reads as an assemblage of geometric shapes, with a central soaring rectilinear volume bookended by smaller square and cylindrical spaces. The house began as a 780-square-foot cottage, and over the years Hill made several additions, many incorporating light monitors and fenestration in interesting geometric patterns. “Normally when you work on a historic structure, you might find a date that you restore it back to. That wasn’t possible here—it was a living architectural being up until the day he died.”

When her clients, a retired couple from Silicon Valley, enlisted the firm to bring the residence into the 21st century, Schicketanz embraced the challenge. The first order of business: what to do with the interior surfaces. Hill was as much an artist as an architect, and the interior reflected his many material experimentations. 



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