highland park

There has been beautiful sun the last couple days, so with a half hour to spare today I sped up to Highland Park to try to track down some of Gutnayer's built projects. Most of his projects in the suburbs are labeled with the client and street name only, so I have to go out and drive around to find them. One address was a maybe: it looked like a well designed ranch house with one pronounced eave, but it was hard to call. One was probably lost (replaced with a new/old french country house) and the other was, well, this.

 

  

  

This eave is redwood. It looks to be in pretty remarkable shape. This house is on a corner site, as are most of his houses. I really appreciate the way the house looks so different from each angle. Also—and I don't know whether this is brilliant or strange—the balance of the house from the outside appears to be a fairly standard ranch.

I have not seen one of these strong patterned eaves in person until today. They appear in a number of his projects, including the original drawings for our house.

 

In the design for our house, the redwood eave was to hold a clerestory window that would let light into the main floor. There were to be two of them, one facing south, the other north (you can see it in this elevation peeking out behind the front clerestory). He instead used seven skylights to light the main floor (or 'sky domes' as he called them out in the drawings: perhaps that was the term at the time). While I have been doubtful that these would look good on our house, I love it on the house above. And think it is well paired with the unique brick pattern. Gutnayer was not shy about detail. I really, really would like to get inside some of these and see how they feel from within.