Two with a View - Page 2

Double-height living provides another opportunity for views, Toole points out—internal views of her expansive art collection, which she has room to hang thanks to oodles of wall space.

She enjoys another aspect of two-story living—the built-in exercise device. “You’re always running up and down,” she says of the stairs, which in her home have a surprisingly traditional look, though they are original, with closed treads and a wooden banister. “Physically, I think it’s beneficial.”

In the San Rafael neighborhood of Terra Linda, Ted Bloyd and Julia Smetana enjoy their view on Butternut Drive, less spectacular though it is. “What’s nice is, everything else around us is one story,” Julia says. “We do have a view, which is nice.”

Terra Linda has 13 two-story homes in all—including 11 on nearby Beechnut Court and a one on adjacent Las Ovejas Avenue. The Bloyd-Smetana house, from 1959, is the only example on Butternut.

Bloyd and Smetana, lawyers both, raised two boys and a girl in the home. Their upper story, which contains living areas and a kitchen, has glass walls on both north and south faces.

“I love that you can look through the house,” Julia says. And their four downstairs bedrooms stay cool year-round. “Even in summer,” Ted says, “downstairs it never gets much above 60 degrees.”

Despite the glassiness, their home suggests a mountain cabin thanks to warm wooden walls. Ted credits the first owner. “He waxed the walls annually,” he says. “That’s why the mahogany is still in good shape.”

On Beechnut, Leo Maginnis and his family bought a double-height model before the cul de sac was built, in 1961. The owner of a single-story Eichler nearby, he wanted a larger home to accommodate in-laws.

“The Eichler salesman,” Maginnis recalls, “said, ‘Well, we have plans for an Eichler. I know this isn’t what you want. But look at it. We want your ideas. We know you’ve lived in an Eichler. What’s good about it? What’s bad about it?’

“My wife liked the view. I liked the house.”

“We can do it,” Maginnis told the salesman.

The house, like several near-identical models in the neighborhood, has all the living space on the top floor, with garage and storage beneath.

Tara Maginnis, his daughter, loved growing up there because the home provided wonderful views of the valley.

Owners of giraffe-like Eichlers like the added height so much, some maximize the value of that height. Betty Toole, a scholar who’s written extensively about Lord Byron’s daughter, writer and mathematician Ada Lovelace, ‘the enchantress of numbers,’ began using her roof as a view deck. “I do come up here and sit and drink a glass of wine,” she says.

Bloyd and Smetana have their view deck near the top of the steep hillside that borders their house, a hillside they’ve otherwise filled with cherry and apple trees, kumquats and loquats, asparagus and peppers.

The deck’s got a view of several of Marin County’s ridgeline open space preserves. “We’re all set up for mint juleps here,” Ted says, “when we get the spare time to use it.”