To appreciate fully what Sea Ranch is, you have to step back in time to 1960, and imagine what it could have been. At that time, the area was just 10 miles of rocky coastline and lonely ranchland abutting the Pacific Ocean. Known as Del Mar Ranch, the 4,000 acres of grassland had been logged, farmed with sheep, and planted with periodic rows of cypress trees to control a near constant wind. Sea Ranch would soon be developed as a planned community of mostly second homes, but the developers decided to try something new. They hired a smart team of thinkers, designers, and builders to develop the land cautiously, thoughtfully, and with foresight.
The project’s founding landscape architect, Lawrence Halprin, put together a handwritten and watercolor-painted one-page document remarkable in its simplicity:
• No lawns
• Native trees only
• No paint,
• Houses in clusters, limit heights
• Avoid suburbanization
Included in Halprin’s master landscape plan was the novel idea to preserve half of the land for common use — for wandering and walking and gazing out to sea. Today, no matter where you are in Sea Ranch, your eyes quickly find the vast Pacific Ocean and the far-off horizon, and your ears are filled with the sound of crashing waves.
Among the first buildings built at Sea Ranch was a 10-unit complex called Condominium One. Sea Ranch’s developers hired four architects, who were relatively young at the time, with the idea that they would design a building to set the tone for things to come. The architects — Charles Moore, Richard Whitaker, Donlyn Lyndon, and William Turnbull — took cues from the local barns and sheep sheds that, through integrity and strong character, belonged to the landscape. Condominium One had a blank facade and large structural timber sawn at local mills, as well as a single continuous angled roofline designed to deflect northwesterly winds. The building launched a Sea Ranch idiom, a north coast regionalist architecture of new wave, vertical redwood-sided cabins. Condominium One was a prototype for Sea Ranch, set there on the cliffs to be learned from and mirrored, added to, and copied.
