Touring the Sea Ranch From Your Home

Fall is the ideal time to visit the Sea Ranch, that amazing blend of modernism and landscape in northern Sonoma. But if you can’t make it in person check out these recently devised alternatives.

Architect Donlyn Lyndon, one of the inventors in the 1960s of the Sea Ranch style, as it has come to be known, has recorded a lively audio walking tour that could be listened to either while walking the hills and meadows of Sea Ranch – but then you wouldn’t hear the birds or the wind – or at home or while in your car.

On The Sea Ranch Association website you can also find printed versions off the tour, complete with photos, that can be downloaded, as well as maps.

Describing Condominium One, which he helped design with his firm, MLTW (Charles Moore, Lyndon, William Turnbull, Richard Whitaker), Lyndon says:

“It has been characterized as a “wooden rock” or as similar to the irregular cliffs fronting the cove. It bears such similes not because it was made to imitate its surroundings, but because, like them it responds to the specifics of site and the forces of nature so present in the place. The walls, when they fold or recede, are following the search for a particular view to the cove or horizon or to accommodate a configuration that offers more outlook for rooms deeper inside the complex.”

And if you want to learn more about individual houses and about the genesis of Sea Ranch, Lyndon’s original 2004 book has been updated and enlarged. ‘The Sea Ranch, Fifty Years of Architecture, Landscape, and Placemaking on the Northern California Coast,’ is available from Princeton Architectural Press.

But, you know, if you’re in the Bay Area it only takes four hours to get there. Drive slowly and enjoy the view.

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