Luxurious Villas By Region:
Sonoma Estate, California
Description:
Located just 45 miles (less than one hour) from the Golden Gate Bridge,
the main house sits in an oasis of privacy in a serene, natural old
growth Oak and grassland setting. With its “top of the world”
position on the south facing shoulder of the Sonoma Mountain ridge, the
estate compound has spectacular 270-degree vistas to the West, South and
East, overlooking the entirety of the San Francisco North Bay Delta 1300
feet below. From the house, one commands framed views to the glistening
city of San Francisco rising above the Bay, to the nearby town of
Sonoma, to the Petaluma Wetlands, to the mountains above Napa and the
Russian River.
And as might be expected on a mountain top, the house grounds are in full sun for the entire day. Through out the year the site affords spectacular horizon line sunrises and sunsets, often these are magically visible above the clouds lying in the valley below.
Yet this Mt Olympus like promontory is flat and large enough to include, in close proximity to the house, a two-acre lake, a 70-foot lagoon style swimming pool, extensive productive gardens, a tennis court, a full softball field and much more.
ENTRY
Cars drive through three electrically operated gates to get to the
private secluded house site. The final gate leads to parking for a dozen
cars nestled in a thick grove of large ancient Bay and Oak trees. (There
is a huge expanse of easy “overflow” parking a very short walk just
on the other side of the gate.) Once the car is parked under the tress,
it is a few steps down a forested stone path to the Hansel-and-Gretal
like front door entry. From this side the feeling is of entering an on
ground tree house.
THE GREAT ROOM
Upon opening the front door the surprise is that the visitor is on a mid
level landing overlooking a huge two story Great Room with a sweeping
staircase made of old bay trees leading to the ground floor. A red wood
ceiling with retractable skylights opens the space to the sky. And
straight ahead the floor to ceiling windows look out – not on a forest
such as the one entered – but on the Sonoma Savanna with it’s
natural grasses and views of the lake, the valleys and San Francisco in
the distance.
An arcade around the second floor contains bookshelves, chairs and desks and allows for people to relax in their own space without leaving the hubbub of the central area. They can look down from their book and see what is going on with the main group. The ground floor, with it’s 30 foot ceiling, opens to the Family Kitchen on one side and the Banquet Hall on the other. At the opposite side of the grand staircase is a spectacular rammed earth fireplace. Three distinct sitting areas allow for intimate conversations in the enormous hall.
The walls of the house are made of rammed earth, similar in feeling to adobe only here the earth is compressed into a solid wall rather than made from sun-dried bricks. The design reproduces California mission style, with no paint in the house at all and old-growth California Redwood wooden beams. Furniture is of leather and wood handcrafted in Mexico. This room has three seating areas under 30-foot ceilings. Hand woven tribal carpets lay over large earthen tiles with inlay wood from the site.
THE BANQUET HALL.
Symmetrically opposite the kitchen and across the Great Room, the
over-sized Banquet Hall grand table seats up to 24 people, expandable to
36. The dining room table is custom made for the room out of old growth
redwood planks with logs legs– the same redwood used for the beams of
the estate. The table is contractible, with each leaf working on hidden
levers for convenient set up and removal. At the end of the room a
rammed earth fireplace burns to add to the ambience and merriment
A separate catering kitchen abuts the banquet hall, complete with convection ovens, range, catering carts and china and silverware.
Above the pantry counter and visible from dinning area, a wall of windows overlooks the 200-year-old bay and oak tree forest while the other side of the Banquet hall overlooks the Sonoma savanna, lake and valley vistas. The floors are earthen tiles, all poured on-site with California wood inlay. Sky Ranch is filled with art and artifacts, from Indian baskets to handmade bows and arrows and arts and primitive native crafts from around the world.
THE FAMILY KITCHEN:
Just off the Great Room, the Family Kitchen is a generous two room
affair dominated by a large cast stone center island for food
preparation, or for buffets or for seating of 8 people to eat and/or
socialize. The main room contains a professional sized Sub-zero
refrigerator and Viking stove with 6 gas burners and two convection
ovens. Calphalon pots hang down at the ready for the best chef, and
Henkel knives wait to create your favorite cuisines. A professional
espresso maker sits ready to use with separate decaf and caffeinated
coffee grinders— the same machines used at Starbucks.
The backroom pantry contains a 30 ft counter, a second sink and two dishwashers as well as an extra refrigerator/freezer for drinks and ice cream etc., giving kids and guests easy access to snack food, without having to rifle through the main kitchen. There are place settings for more than forty-people with hand blown Mexican Margarita glasses.
The garden is available to guests and you can supplement your menu with home grown tomatoes, zucchini, lettuce – even a bunch of grapes or two!
THE PANTRY
There is a large catering pantry off the dinning room that connects to
the full wine cellar and to the other pantry off the kitchen. These
pantries contain stoves, refrigerators, sinks and appliances. All of Sky
Ranch’s cabinetry was done on site; the Bay wood cabinets store glass,
dishes, and stemware. There are two dishwashers, one normal, one
commercial, and a double sink.
THE BAR-B-QUE
On the outdoor side of the Great Room’s chimney is a counter height,
deep bar-b-que that vents up through a separate flew in the chimney.
THE INFORMAL DINNING ROOM
Just off the kitchen is a convenient cozy dinning area that seats 8
people at an antique pine table under a handmade wrought iron lamp
featuring the scene of Indians on horse back around a large tee-pee.
THE FAMILY ROOM
The large family room is at the other end of the house from the Great
Room, but close to the Kitchen and adjacent to the informal dinning
room. It features a large screen TV, an oversized sofa and armchairs, a
window seat and table and chairs to accommodate 10 or more people. There
is wood burning stove, a guest bathroom with shower and outside deck
that leads to the hot tub. The fabrics are hand-woven and the chairs are
from Mexico. The large hand-woven Indian floor rug is also from Mexico.
COMPUTER OFFICE
Just off the library mezzanine of the Great Room, sits a cozy private
office with a fax/printer and desk top computer attached to a high speed
internet line from a downlink off an on-site telecom substation
satellite dish.
MASTER BEDROOM
The large main bedroom has a separate sitting area with a TV and
wood-burning stove, and has a large walk-in closet. Like all the
bedrooms, it has through-ventilation, a natural air-conditioning system
that uses the coolness of the forest. Every bedroom has a south facing
deck looking out on the meadows and lake and San Francisco in the
distance and a north facing deck looking into the forests. All rooms
have ceiling fans that keep the house beautifully cool in summer and
nicely warm in winter. Fabrics are hand-woven cotton.
MASTER BATH
The master bath is composed of three rooms, plus an out door shower deck
with two showerheads. The indoor shower room has three individual
showerheads and the separate bathtub room has His and Hers sinks set in
vanity counters on opposing sides of the room. There are two doors
leading to a private deck with a bench set into the end corner of the
house veranda opposite a porch swing.
THE JACK LONDON GUEST BEDROOM
This is the only bedroom besides the master bedroom that is off the
mezzanine of the Great Room. As a result, it has an Arts and Crafts
hunting lodge feel with its lamps and sconces made on site of natural
mica and with its site forged door handles. The room features its own
television in a native hardwood armoire. The south facing deck is to the
left, the full private bath is to the right.
VALLEJO GUEST BEDROOM
Out the south glass doors of this room is just visible the distant naval
port of Vallejo on the North Shore of San Francisco Bay. All the beds
are custom designed for Sky Ranch with a feather bed covered with a
thick wool mattress pad and down comforters with Mission style headboard
made in Mexico.
THE SONOMA MOUNTAIN GUEST BEDROOM
The glass double doors frame the view of the lake and the meadows of
this Sonoma Mountain promontory. The roon features a white Mission-style
headboard and solid-wood furniture. Throughout the house is a mixture of
Native Indian art and Mexican Village art.
THE SAN FRANCISCO GUEST BEDROOM
This bedroom features a lovely sitting bench in a huge plate glass
corner of the room with views of far away San Francisco from the window.
THE PETALUMA GUEST BEDROOM
An antique roll-top writing desk made in California graces this
particularly spacious bedroom. The bedroom is at the end of the house
and so has glass on three sides, including a bay window that looks
directly West toward the town of Petaluma.
THE BOHEMIAN GROVE GUEST BEDROOM
This is the only bedroom on the first floor and is between the family
room and the kitchen pantry. Its high windows peek up into the lush
forest canopy on the north side. Because it is the smallest bedroom it
is perfect for children, overnight guests, or staff.
The owner wanted a house and grounds that would accommodate large parties but also be a private intimate setting for as little as two people. As a result, the emphasis is on “cozy” rather than “formal.” The extensively landscaped 20-acre house grounds are designed as a barefoot wilderness area, all the many different native grasses have been selected so that one can hike without shoes around the entire lake at any time during the year. In fact, Sky Ranch has perhaps one of the largest groomed natural landscapes of all of California’s private homes.
The obvious human elements (tennis court, softball field, producing gardens and green house, cars, helicopter etc.) are all tucked away slightly below the mountain plateau or obscured by the trees.
During the daytime the timeless natural beauty of these grasslands and the surrounding ancient Northern California hills and North Bay water courses dominates the views. During the night, the view comes alive with the twinkling lights of a dozen nearby and far away California towns and cities, most of which are invisible during the day.
Although the site is part of the larger George Ranch Equestrian Community, the closest neighbor is still at least a half mile away, and the next closest is a full mile.
ARCHITECTURE
The 18,000 square foot 6 ½ bedroom rammed earth Main Ranch House can be
described as California Mission Style meets Frank Lloyd Wright. The
traditional hacienda vocabulary has been updated to include thoroughly
contemporary style and function.
The main floor spaces flow magically from one to the next under oversized wood beams and rafters. Exterior room corners are made of butt-glazed full height plate glass. The warm flesh-tone earthen walls and the reddish-brown old-growth redwood timber (recycled) retain their original colors – they are neither painted nor stained. Consequently, their natural tones wonderfully compliment the colors of the breathtaking wilderness landscape viewed through the windows and glass doors of every room.
The house was purposefully positioned on a split-level site so that the North side would be “on grade” with the uphill side and the South side “on grade” with the downhill side. And because this split level occurs at the boundary between forest and meadow, the house straddles two distinct micro-climates (in California summers, forests can be 15 degrees cooler than the areas in open sun.)
The house is completely surrounded by a roofed-in two-story deck veranda totaling 6000 of the building’s 18,000 square feet. As a result, every bedroom has its own generous “in the air” south facing deck as well as opening on to a tree-house feeling forest deck “on the ground” on the opposite side.
The kitchen and living room areas all open to the extensive covered earthen tile deck and natural grass lawn, which slopes down to the adjacent lake and swimming areas. The use of boulders and natural plants throughout the view-scape create a seamless transition from the house to the pre - California - GoldRush vista of old growth trees and rolling natural grass hills.
With no other houses visible from the immediate surroundings, it is impossible at times to imagine one is so close to the hub of one of America’s most vibrant metropolitan areas, or possibly that one even is living in the present day.
The beams and rafters are made of old growth redwood trees - lumber that is rarely available for construction today. (To acquire this precious thousand-year-old Northern California redwood, the owner benefited from a dismantled turn of the century bridge as well as from a large number of like aged disassembled wine barrels that he happened to find on the market at the time.) In addition, bay and madrone trees that had fallen on the property were milled and crafted into cabinetry and flooring.
During construction, workshops were established on site, including separate forge, cabinetry and stone making shops. Virtually every aspect of the house emerged from one of these: from the rammed earth counter tops and tiles, to the hand forged iron door /cabinetry hardware, to the hand made mica lamps, to the cast stone sink bowls.
The cozy forest entrance to the house leads into a huge dramatic, two-story Great Room, with a library balcony mezzanine on its upper level and the lake visible below through two stories of plate glass windows. (Thanks to retractable skylights, this space literally opens up to the sky.) Living, eating, and entertainment areas are downstairs; bedrooms upstairs.
History:
For 175 years before the owner bought the property, the land had been
part of a working cattle ranch. There had never been any structures or
roads except those paths made by the cows themselves. It is still
bordered on the two sides near the house by large operating cattle
ranches.
The resultant spectacular contemporary house is a true one-of-a-kind crafted art piece reflecting the long eight-year odyssey by the owner and his team of architects, artisans and landscape ecologists. In the process they were able to consider, design and in many cases even fabricate on-site every detail of this house which at once is thoroughly modern while at the same time making complete use of centuries-old building methods, craftsmanship and materials.
First the owner camped out extensively on the more than 150-acre site, deliberating on every detail, beginning with the siting of the house and the installation of its two-acre lake. The owner wanted a house that not only was made from the actual earth and trees of the immediate area but also spoke to Sonoma’s cultural history as well. He was inspired by the local area’s earliest surviving structure, a nearly 200-year-old adobe house built on the Original Land grant of California State Senator and General Vallejo.
To this historic adobe-and-timber feeling he then added indigenous
Indian geometric designs into the floor tiles and decorated the house
with native Indian crafts including ancient Indian arrowheads and a
California Miwok Indian stone-ware bowl found on the site. The salmon
colored earth for the walls came from a particular spot just across the
valley picked for its unique color (and low-clay content) soil. And true
to the owner’s intent, much of the finished wood is from fallen trees
on the site (no healthy live trees have ever been cut down on the
property.)
Temperature control:
The house benefits from a well-planned natural air conditioning system: every room has through ventilation, overhead fans, and southern exposure with deep overhangs, all with temperature control aided by the thermal mass of its 3 foot thick earthen walls. The one room deep floor plan runs east to west along the edge of an Oak and Bay tree forest, consequently each room can receive fresh air from either the sunny southern savanna or from the refreshing shade of the forest’s cool canopy.
Instead of changing a thermostat, the occupant either opens or closes a screened glass door or turns on or off a fan. The house can remain refreshingly cool even on those occasional days when outside temperatures exceed 100 degrees. Then when outside temperatures decline, the thermal properties of the house retain its pleasant temperature, until heat is needed from the multi-zone radiant floor heating system or from the house’s 4 wood burning fireplaces.
Sky Ranch is its own self contained destination resort containing a full compliment of amenities that exceed that of most vacation hotels. Yet, unlike hotels, the Ranch is utterly secluded and private. From the beginning, it was designed to be the ultimate personal get away experience.
WATER SPORTS
Naturally nestled into the mountain top topography, the two acre willow
encircled lake has a small island with picnic tables and a swimming
float. A large white sand beach is all that separates the lake from the
oversized 70 foot lagoon style pool, sitting among crafted boulders and
wetlands like a stream fed pond that would be found adjacent to a Sierra
Mountains lake. A large native style redwood open-air cabana provides
shade for relaxing by the beach and the water.
A challenging 60 foot hand formed concrete water slide tunnels through overgrown vegetation from the hill top, starting from a shaded pool adjacent to the12 person Hot Tub (also built of stone). The owner wanted to be able to relax in the Jacuzzi and then be able to cool off by jumping on the slide which ends in an exhilarating waterfall plunge into the pool.
The other adventurous way to plunge into the lake is on the 200 foot zip line run that ends with a refreshing drop into the water. During the summer, the lake warms into the low to mid 80’s making for excellent swimming.
Next to the pool is the combination pool pavilion/boat house/fishing lodge, built to resemble an Indian hunting cabin but with all the amenities inside: shower and changing room, toilet, a kitchen with dishwasher and a storage area for life jackets, fishing poles and giant water pistols. The bathhouse adjoins a floating lake dock, with a dozen kayaks and rowboats at the ready. The lake is stocked with bass and bluegills (catch and release, please.) The sun deck in front of the boat house traps the southern sun and is a place to come on stubborn winter days when no other out door spot beckons.
ATHLETIC PLAYING AREA
Adjacent to the lake ( but hidden from view) sits a regulation size
softball field with a separate batting cage and pitching machine. The
tennis court doubles as a basketball court with opposing hoops. This
athletic complex has ample adjacent parking for “game days.”
GAME PATIO
On the forest side of the house (which can be 10 degrees cooler on the
hottest summer days) is the out door game patio. Here are a wide range
of amusements including a pool table, ping pong table, in-ground
trampolines, tether ball, swings, horseshoe pits and darts.
GARDENS
There are extensive producing gardens on the site, including a fruit
orchard, a raised bed vegetable garden, cutting flowers, greenhouse and
a thousand-bush rose garden.
HORSEBACK RIDING
Sky Ranch is part of the larger George Ranch Equestrian Community with
miles of horse trails that cross the Association’s individual
properties. Although Sky Ranch does not feature a full horse barn,
horses can be put to paddock within easy walking of the house and there
are covered areas available to set up tack if the guest wishes. There
are riding stables in the area for boarding or hiring horses as well as
guides available to accompany riders.
NATIVE LANDSCAPE
The owner concentrated on planting native California trees and shrubs
around the lake to blend in with the existing old growth trees of the
area. These plantings were arranged and trimmed for view and walkways,
but otherwise left in a wild state like the countless 200 – 300 year
old Bay and Oaks that were already at the site. The idea is that walking
just a few feet from the house gives one a feeling comparable to being
in a vast wilderness, but without any of the inconveniences or
discomforts.
Ten different native grasses were selected and planted around the house and lake to allow for maximum diversity and vigor. While seamlessly blending with the wild grasses of the virgin surrounding hills, the managed grasses allow for barefoot walking throughout the year. When the surrounding California hills turn golden in the summer, the tops of the estate grasses do too, although they continue to be watered during the dry summers to keep the lower shoots green, healthy and soft.
Whether a long hike or a short 5 minute stroll, the site affords the best in secluded private exploring of the pristine natural setting.
The flat mountain top site beckons the visitor to explore different viewing spots of the often spectacular horizon line sunrises and sunsets.
FIRST LEVEL MEADOW PATIO
Along the entire length of the house is a gracious Mexican tile deck
under a broad overhang that looks out on the acres of native California
grasses and across to the views of distant San Francisco. There are
dinning tables for Al fresco meals and lounge chairs for relaxing and
sunning.
SECOND LEVEL VISTA VERANDAS
The second floor has deep sunny south facing decks that look out over
the meadows, lake and views. Although the overhangs are generous,
several cut outs have been designed for finding private sun bathing
spots.
FOREST SIDE DECKS
The house was purposefully built into a one-story hill, so both the
first floor and the second floor could be “on grade.” While the
first floor is on level with the south facing meadow patio, the entire
second floor is on level with the North facing forest decks on the other
side, nestled among the trees with hand pieced twig and bark railings.
The forest side can be 15 degrees cooler on the occasional hot summer
days, whether one is playing in the forest game patio or relaxing in a
tree trunk hung hammock.
Amenities
- 6 Bedrooms
- 6 Baths
- Swimming Pool
- Tennis Court
- Jacuzzi
- Private Beach
- Fireplaces
- Housekeeper
- Gardener
$ - 5,500 USD per Night
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