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| Author: |
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Doc Searls |
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| Posted: |
5/25/2001; 11:01:41 AM |
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Look out
I'm hacking away here on an ancient Linux box called Happy (uptime: 87 days) at the old place,
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Emerald Palms — The old new house
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which is much newer and nicer than our new place; but we're committed Santa Barbarians now, so there we go.
My sister tells me what Joyce wants for our anniversary is to sell the old house. Me too. So I'm going to try, right here.
It shouldn't be hard, except for the fact that Silicon Valley turned into Virginia City when the '99ers Sand Hill Lode ran out. One day we were knee deep in a flowing river of other people's money and then: it stopped. It was like the Mississippi suddenly turned into the Los Angeles River in August.
But the boom days will return. This is too good a place not to live in if you want to be in downtown Tech City. And I challenge you to find a house better suited to the purpose.
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View across the palm-framed yard
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Let me tell you why.
This is our dream house. We had it designed and built to fit us like a glove: an ideal home for two hard-working parents with an adventurous little boy who needed to cook and entertain in casual style alongside the fattest pipe to the Net they could find in a spot with one of the best views on Earth.
The house embodies equal sums of beauty, function and, frankly, inspired design. It's not some developer's boxy McMansion with a faux tudor or mission wrapper on vast wasted great rooms and foyers. Its only agendas were our own needs and the expression of our architect's genius.
Here's the rundown, which I'd brag on even if we didn't have it on the market —
- Knockout view of almost the entire Bay Area from 800 feet atop Emerald Hills, which is between Woodside and Redwood City. (It's a Woodside zip code, FWIW.) For those outside the area, look up "Edgewood Park" and 94062 in Mapquest or the equivalent.
- This isn't just any view. The house was built high on the back of the lot to take advantage of the location, which is simply one of the finest vantages in the whole Bay Area. The view extends from St. Helena Mountain (North of the Wine Country, 110 miles away) to Mt. Diablo (40 miles away) to Mission Peak, Monument Peak, Mt. Hamilton (with Lick Observatory), Loma Prieta (40 miles away) and the whole Santa Cruz Mountain ridge. All are visible right now from here in our office. Hammocked between them is nearly the whole Bay. What we're missing is San Francisco itself. ( We get half the Bay Bridge.)
- The original house was a ranch built in the early '70s. We bought it in '97 and completely remodeled it. In nearly every respect it's a new house.
- It's exceptionally well-built. Our contractor was Akio Patrick's Midglen Construction of Woodside, and our architect was his dad, the remarkable William Patrick, AIA, who was apprenticed to Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin West and whose firm is The Midglen Studio. The house has a Wright-influenced look, as you can see from the photo above. Lots of wide open indoor-outdoor space, strong horizontal lines with decks and balconies off nearly every room. I have no idea what the feng-shui of the place is, but I do know it has what Wright afficianadi call flow of space. It's remarkable.
- While the house itself has over 3700 square feet, the decks add another 1000+ feet, and are essentially part of the living area.
- The whole front is nearly a wall of glass, facing roughly toward magnetic North so you get beautiful views without that greenhouse effect that comes when a house faces any other direction (unless you're Down Under, in which case the polarity is reversed).
- It has just under a half acre of land, with a real lawn in the front. Beautifully landscaped too, surrounded by a circular driveway. Sprinklers everywhere, of course. (We just did the landscaping last Summer.) There is also a small lawn in the back, along with a patio surrounded by gardens. The patio continues around to the front deck. Most of it, especially the front, is shaded. A palm tree also grows through the front deck next to a lush redwood tree.
- There are five palm trees in the yard, two of them with trunks as wide as a car. Yet the view looks over them, thanks to the gentle slope of the yard. We've been calling the place "Emerald Palms" for years — partly as a joke, but it fits.
- It has four bedrooms, including two legitimate masters, a small kids' room and a guest room that can double as an office conference area.
- Two large offices share one space on the second floor with a panoramic view that stretches from the Santa Cruz Mountains across Silicon Valley and the rest of the Bay. All the furnishings are custom rift-cut oak, with plenty of both Ethernet and electrical service. I had as many as seven computers working here at once, plus a fax, two printers and a copier, without any infrastructural strain (the house itself runs on 200 amps). Simply put, it's the best place I ever worked in my life. The office also also a little kitchen area and plenty of storage in a large walk-in closet with a high ceiling and many cubbies.
- It has 4.5 bathrooms: one for each of the masters, one each for the guest BR and the kid's BR, and a powder in the hall. Nearly every one has the same garnet-veined white granite counters as the kitchen, and the same rift-cut oak cabinetry as the rest of the house.
- The floor downstairs is dark red-brown Australian Jarah, which is as hard as oak and deeply beautiful. People are always knocked out by it. The entry stairs are the same wood. The decks are redwood with tempered glass railings so they don't block the view. The upstairs floors are all berber (sp?) carpeting. The laundry is also upstairs, to make it convenient to the master. Connecting them all is a three-story stair tower with glass up the whole front.
- The large master bedroom has an amazing view through a nearly all-glass wall in the front. Yet it's high enough that the sight lines leave plenty of privacy. Its deck — really a balcony — is cantilevered out and surrounded on three sides by open air; yet the palm tree that grows through the deck below gives it a sheltered feeling. It's a perfect place to sit outside with your tea, coffee and laptop. Or just to meditate. The master also has two large walk-in closets with built in cabinetry and cedar floors.
- The master bath has a large shower with glass block walls, 900 watts of mirror lighting and a jacuzzi tub (I think that's what you call it... it circulates water and makes bubbles).
- The kitchen is co-designed by Joyce and Bill Patrick as an ideal place for foodies who love both to cook and to entertain. Joyce will miss the kitchen as much as we'll both miss the office. The kitchen is spacious and feature three ovens, a professional Thermidor gas stov, a quiet Bosch dishwasher, garbage disposals in all three sinks, a hot & cold filtered water faucet, and two separate food preparation areas, including one by windows that lift outward to the patio to make it easy to pass food out and in. Plumbing fixtures throughout the house are all beautiful, by the way.
- The living room, family room, hall and dining room are all, in a Wright-like fashion, made to provide both privacy and flow between each space and the outdoors. The dining room has four french doors that open out onto the patio. The living and dining rooms also have double doors opening out to the front deck.
- There are two fireplaces: one in the family room and the other above it in the master bedroom.
- There's a two-story vertical space we call an atrium (though technically it isn't — we just can't find a noun for the space) that extends upward from the family and living rooms into the master and guest rooms upstairs, surrounded on all but its ceiling by glass and open interior space. This gives the downstairs rooms an 18-foot wall of glass toward the view for all four rooms, upstairs and down.
- There are built-in surround sound speakers in the family room and the master bedroom, plus built-in speakers in the kitchen and living room, and more on the front deck and in the back garden. Sound is distributed throughout the house and neighborhood by our own low power FM station (we have a great location for a pirate station, but I'm too old for that). The speakers are all Cambridge, and the connections are all Niles.
- The roof sports four antennas, none of which are easily visible from the yard, the street or the driveways, because the roof is flat and the house sits high on the back of the property. The antennas are: one rotating FM (feeds the stereo in the office), one fixed FM (feeds the house), one rotating TV (feeds the house), and one Dish Network satellite TV (feeds the house). There is also plenty of extra RG-6 Quad Shield co-ax cable to the roof for addtional service. Most of it goes to the garage, where it can be patched selectively to any or all of the rooms. There is one "home run" each to the living room and the office.
- In addition to coax, there is Cat5 Ethernet cabling running to nearly every room in the house, some with multiple outlets. These are currently fed by DSL through a router and hub in the garage, and a satellite hub in the office.
- The house currently has six phone lines (plus the DSL) and a Panasonic digital super hybrid office PBX phone system There are also two large buried service pipes running from the house to the street, making it easy to pull more service of any kind (cable, phone, whatever).
- In addition to the 2-car garage, there is plenty of storage in the space under the house and in closets. And room for more, if you want to build it out.
- The house is just on the other side of Edgewood Park from Highway 280, between the Edgewood and Farm Hill exits. The park is just a short walk from the house, and a beautiful place to walk, run or just get lost in woods that feature what I have heard is more different plant species than anywhere else in California.
- It's just 18 miles from the airport (SFO), and rarely more than 22 minutes by car. Living near 280 is an important strategic decision if you're a frequent flyer. Much as I loved living in Palo Alto ('85-'92), I hated the chancy nature of driving Highlay 101 to the airport. Highway 280 (aka Junipero Serra Freeway) is such a gracious anomaly that even grumpy visitors like it. (One says "the rolling pastoral landscape was indeed conducive to meditative tranquility — the visual realm of Windham Hill videos.")
- And hey, it's in the Roy Cloud School district. Best around, from what we gather.
I've gotta go get ready for our hot date tonight. Meanwhile, if you feel like helping me get Joyce the ultimate anniversary present, contact our agent, Orla Sater, or email me for more details.
Lovin' A
The laptop is crapped out. I have no email, or pretty much anything else, technically. It's gloomy outside, and it looks like a long wet drive to the old place today.
But so what. Ten years ago today Joyce and I were married on a perfect and sunny afternoon in Los Angeles, and it's a day more worth celebrating than ever.
So wish us many more of the same, and we'll see ya after the weekend.
Copyright 2009 The Doc Searls Weblog
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