ADMIRERS call it the most beautiful — house on the most beautiful site
in the U.S. Any architect would envy the site and some might have
suggestions for doing things differently , but all
would agree that Architect Nathaniel Owings has built himself a house
that any man could be proud of. Site and architect came together by sheer chance. Seven years ago,
rotund, ebullient Nat Owings, 56, a senior partner of the huge
architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, was visiting San,
Francisco for the express purpose of courting a handsome divorcee,
Margaret Wentworth. One fine fall day they set out on a picnic in the
precipitous Big Sur country south of Carmel. Scrambling along the
cliffs, they came upon a finger of land that thrust out into the
Pacific in lonely grandeur. To the south, they could see a 40-mile
sweep of coastline. Six hundred feet below, sea lions barked on a small
white sand beach. As they sat on a massive rock lunching on peaches and
champagne, they decided that when they were married this would be the
place for their home. After their marriage a year later, Owings bought the 55-acre site. Says
Owings: “It was six hundred feet long, six hundred feet high and six
feet wide,” and the statement was only a slight exaggeration. What gave
special relish to the job for Nat Owings was that in 32 years of
designing, including work on such large-scale projects as Oak Ridge,
Tenn., Moroccan airbases, and Crown Zellerbach's new building in San
Francisco , he had never built a house. Indian-Mound Garage. Big Sur is challenging country. The land is
periodically shaken by earthquakes, battered by 80-m.p.h. winds;
rainfall can total 72 in. in three months, and termites abound. To cope
with these problems, Owings designed a kind of concrete saddle over the
ridge, anchored by eight caissons reaching down into bedrock. On this
he secured a rigid A-frame, surrounded it with cantilevered balconies
carried around the outside to exploit the spectacular view. For roof
beams he bought 60-year-old redwood timbers of a demolished bridge. A
four-car garage was dug partially out of bedrock, leaving a prehistoric
Indian mound undisturbed. Says Owings: “No house can do more than
snuggle into and grab hold of and hold on to a sheer bit of granite on
this coast.” The Owingses decided to call their new house “Wild Bird” because “we
have the feeling of soaring in mid-air—airplanes often pass below the
house, and red-tailed hawks are our constant visitors.” Through
binoculars they have seen mountain climbers tumble to the beach below,
once had to call in some professional rock climbers to rescue Nat
Owings' 16-year-old daughter Jennifer, who was caught at nightfall
halfway up the cliff.
