'Flower' Power

Where have you been all our lives, Flower House?

Sprouting up out of the Berkeley Hills, an impossibly pretty aerial view of a flower-shaped home with petal-shaped barrel vaults recently caught our eye while perusing Bay Area real estate listings.

Topped by a dome roof comprised of a dozen petals, the futuristic Flower House, at 1112 Sterling Avenue, looks every bit like a pavilion one would have come across at the 1964 New York World's Fair. The house was listed at $1.189 million before recently taking offers.

As the story goes, the intriguing home, studio, and performance space was designed and built by artist and composer Charles MacDermed, whose dream was to present music to audiences in a three-dimensional setting.

Never fully realized, the home remains unfinished today, leaving us to only imagine what it would have been like to attend a concert there, against a backdrop of the San Francisco Bay.

"The top floor space commands a bay view and…once I got involved in designing around the tetrahedron, I was quickly moved to realizing that I wanted to have an open-ceiling space basically hovering over that tetrahedron and positioned symmetrically over the basic floor plan," MacDermed pointed out in a video interview a few years ago about the complex geometry of the 1,800-square-foot, steel-framed structure.

Describing the top floor as "an incorporation of a dodecagonal ceiling with 12 conical vaults radiating around that dodecagonal opening," MacDermed further explained that one of his priorities was to design a music studio that would "afford the setting for three-dimensional sound."

Tech lovers will appreciate MacDermed's concept of "a tetrahedral location of four speakers—three on the floor planes [with] two in front of the listener, and one behind—creating an equilateral triangle, and then one pointing in the center of that triangle…enough to create a vigorous three-dimensional sound image."

Living spaces, including a kitchen, dining room, and bedrooms, were planned for the middle and lower levels.