An Indoor / Outdoor Bathroom
Modern fixtures and sleek tile meet rustic duckboards in a bath with a walkout shower.
Synopsis: A designer describes his small, 45-sq. ft. bathroom that features a shower with a red-cedar duckboard floor and walk-out access to an adjacent patio, with a sliding-glass door that can be opened or closed, depending on the weather.
I saw Sea Ranch for the first time in 1981. I had just moved to San Francisco to embark on my career as an industrial designer, and I decided to do a little exploring. I drove north on Highway 1, a winding, two-lane road that runs the length of California’s coastline.
After several hours, I came upon a sign that said “Sea Ranch Lodge.” By this time it was dark, I was tired, and it was one of the few signs I had seen in the past 40 miles. I decided to spend the night. When I awoke, I discovered a dramatic, windswept coastline, home to a community of unique resort homes. I decided I wanted to build a home there someday. Eleven years later, that dream came true.
A master architect lends a hand
The late architect Charles Moore helped me realize my dream. Charles and his firm, Moore, Lyndon, Turnbull and Whitaker, created some of the early architecture at Sea Ranch. Their modern, deceptively simple-looking buildings didn’t try to compete with the landscape. Instead, their unfinished-wood exteriors kept a low profile and paid homage to local houses and barns.
Charles Moore was a masterful architect. For my home, he developed an overall vision that ordered its siting, the transition between rooms and the use of natural light. As I spent more time with Charles, I realized that the areas where I could best contribute in this collaboration were the smaller details. My background in industrial design has made me acutely aware of human interaction with functional devices.
Not quite warm enough for an outdoor shower
One of the things I wanted to create was a unique bathroom. In addition to being contemporary, this bathroom had to accentuate thermal qualities such as warm, cool, humid, airy and cozy. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that my most memorable bathing experiences hadn’t even been in bathrooms. They had been revitalizing outdoor showers during vacations in the tropics or in summers on the East Coast.
Sea Ranch is many things, but tropical is not one of them (the average temperature is 63°F). An outdoor shower would have been impractical. So I opted for the next best thing: an indoor/outdoor shower that would allow a controlled amount of the outdoors to come in depending on the time of day, my mood and the temperature outside. The answer was simple: a custom-fabricated sliding-glass door to offer a clear, controllable solution for temperature, airflow, light, views and passage to the hot tub on the deck.
Western red-cedar duckboards cover the shower floor. They make a removable platform above a recessed, tiled drain. Unfinished wood underfoot reinforces the sense of being outdoors, and the lightweight platform is easy to lift away for cleaning.
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