Wilson House
The Wilson residence of 1968 was designed for a university professor and his artist wife. He wanted a library for research, and she needed space for weaving (done in the balcony above the living room), pottery (including a kiln outdoors), and painting. She designed decoration for the front door, and glass-top dining room and kitchen tables. The floor plan is divided into three areas, following the shape of the roofline. From above the roof looks like an inverted ship hull, with another split through the longitudinal center and offset at a 90 degree angle one floor below. The house rises two stories, above the ground floor with cedar wood siding on the exterior, with a cedar wood ceiling hovering 20 feet above the living room. One enters the house on the garden level, then up some stairs directly into the center of the living/dining area. These two areas are bifurcated by two bandshell-shaped forms, which make up the underside of the lower inverted hull roof structures. Windows are at eye level, providing a continuous view for 270 degrees from the center of the house, at the axis of symmetry. The Wilsons wanted privacy from neighboring houses located very near their site, so the windows allow only a one and a half foot slit view of trees and terraced garden from a standing position.
Another staircase ascends along the central utility shaft (where bathrooms are located on each floor) to the interior balcony clad in the same wood siding as the exterior, which overlooks the entire living/dining/kitchen area, with a bed level view to the north of city lights from slit windows arching 160 degrees around. The windows are located where the walls meet the roof and ascend vertically, with a pane angled 135 degrees off of that to the point that they meet the ceiling. To the south there is a balcony facing the garden with larger window areas that let in the low angled winter sunlight.
In 1972, an arsonist torched the house on a snowy December night. I was at a friends house just a block away and saw the fire raging on the first floor near the fire place. After the fire the Wilsons left the house, and it stood an empty shell for 6 months until Haertling bought it, and began to restore it. The exterior was only moderately damaged, and the structure of the house was deemed safe by authorities. But the interior was badly damaged ( view of dining area, toward the bedroom, the interior balcony.) The entire Haertling family was recruited to help renovate the house. I was a lazy boy of 13 at the time, and wanted to make the work as easy as possible, so when my father was deciding what to do with the damaged wood surfaces of the walls and ceiling, I suggested sand blasting off the char to reveal whatever wood remained underneath it. This was by far the easiest solution. The result was a very beautiful pattern of dark singed wood on the ceiling and walls ( interior after restoration, exterior after restoration.) This house then became the architects home until his death in 1984. The widow of the architect still lives in this house.
