Page 175 - People & Places In Time

Interior Dimensions
The home sits like a nested bird on a promontory while also part of the Pacific Ocean that it looks toward. Though by design, anchored firmly to the earth it appears perched, ready to spread wings and lift into the sky and out to sea. A home could not be placed more directly in the face of the elements; I can only imagine how fiercely the wind and weather intrude on this setting. Yet from what I’ve seen through magazines, inside, this home is warm comfortable and secure. The love of architecture has always been part of who I’ve become, but this house when first seen at age fifteen cemented in me a passion to build the perfect home someday; unfortunately, a dream yet to be fulfilled. Non-the- less this piece of architecture remembered for years, was a thrill for me to come across, finally.
Not for the lack of any talent or ability have I not become an architect. Throughout sixty some years of struggle it didn’t happen and for too many reasons. My two furniture and design stores built forty-five years ago in Fresno were only one stop in this agonizing effort. An effort comprised of numerous starts and stops, enthusiastic beginnings and disheartening failures. Those years when I put my dreams away in a feeble attempt to evade disappointment; yet knowing full well, deep down, the only person that I can be is the creative one.
So finally, I’m facing the last ten or fifteen years of my working life as I’m trying to find again, the experience of my youth, the joy of going to work, doing what I loved.
Time was running out and I was stuck, following fifteen years of turning my back on who I was. This had been another long period that had become a dark and unproductive time in my life. I wrapped up the remaining details of
this episode and enrolled in the engineering program at Fresno State, as the path back to architecture. This was a difficult change in my life, not to mention those closest to me. Fortunately, this is my passion, if not at times a curse, it is also a gift. Though this decision was precipitated by a difficult time I wished behind me, it also precipitated a trying time for those close to me. I had to go ahead and
try, whatever talent still remained would have to carry me through. To make this transition at fifty years of age is not recommended; yet out of this will happen one last chance to redeem myself.
Out of high school, at College of the Sequoias had I set my sites on becoming the top architecture student in a program designed to send students to the Cal Poly architecture program as a junior. I accomplished that goal, just not the part about going on to Cal Poly; and by the way, I still have the draw- ings made toward this effort. The same drawings Mr. Cottrell displayed in a case in the hall for the next semester, for all to see.
During this time, I would also design and draw plans for the Cobb home in Exeter and the Sellers home north of town. For the fireplace in the Sellers house I took inspiration from a Frank Lloyd Wright design I’d found in a House Beautiful magazine.
A house built by Nathanial Owings, along Big Sur south of Carmel. I first saw this house in House Beautiful. It’s important as one of the major catilists to my facina- tion with home design.
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A house plan more recently drawn, perhaps twenty five years ago. Still this is somthing I will con- tinue for as long as I can, as long as I can dream.