“Talk about impulsive!” laughs Marcia Cohen, recalling how she and her husband, John, ended up in Santa Barbara.
Eight years ago, Marcia, a retired family therapist, and John, an architect, got a call from Erin, their actress daughter who needed to fly directly from Vancouver to New York for a job. The problem was that her car had to be back in Los Angeles.
Soon enough, the couple—who made their careers in St. Louis, Missouri—found themselves driving down the West Coast, popping into one town after another. Along the way, they started joking about buying property near the ocean. But each time they stopped at a new place, nothing felt quite right. Seattle and Portland were too cold. They love San Francisco, but it was too dense to build anything substantial. And Cambria was too small. “When we got to Santa Barbara, we knew we didn’t want to go any further south than here,” says John, “so we stopped at a hotel, called the concierge, and said, ‘We need a real estate agent.’”
The two are sitting in the living room of the house they built on the expansive Toro Canyon property that they saw—and spontaneously bought—that day. Designed by John, it’s modern to the extreme yet also serene. The three-bedroom, 7,500-square-foot home is made up of two side-by-side wings—one with a living/dining area and kitchen, the other with the bedrooms—connected by a sleek, glass-enclosed entry. Tall, almost monolithic, unpolished concrete walls and warm-tone eucalyptus paneling alternate with enormous windows, offering peaceful, panoramic views of the sea and islands. The house’s shed-style metal roofs slope from the mountain-facing front of the structure up and out toward the ocean, looking like ski jumps that could launch you into the wild blue yonder.
There’s an integrity to the spaces—a calm exaltation of geometry—that’s achieved by keeping the surfaces almost completely unbroken and the materials organic and limited in number. This clearly has been a personal project for John, who spent much of his career designing commercial spaces. “In this case, I could do what I wanted,” he says.
But don’t let the austerity of the house fool you—if there’s one thing its inhabitants don’t lack, it’s funny facets. On the bulletin board in John’s office hang pictures of the couple’s friends making faces—his “mug shots.” (He’s now painting portraits based on the photographs.) And when it comes to their passionate, longtime pursuit of acquiring art, they are hardly minimalists. Their collection is dominated by playful works such as a specially commissioned multicolor mantle by Mexican glass artist Orefo Quagliata and the doll-like Invisible Man, a winsome bronze sculpture by Ken Little that greets guests at the entrance. The house may be new, but the couple’s history is seamlessly layered into it. Working with Portland-based interior designer Jim Staicoff, the two have incorporated pieces they’ve owned for years, creating intriguing juxtapositions between the new and the antique and vintage. Each piece seems to have a story—from an antique Chinese Tao Kuang-period teak étagère (“the first thing we bought for our first house,” says Marcia) and the Barcelona table they’ve had since 1974 to the Joan of Arc sculpture that John rescued from a demolition project 44 years ago when he was an undergrad at St. Louis’s Washington University (where he went on to get his graduate degree). “It has to be fun!” says Marcia of the interiors. “You can’t take anything too seriously.”
The duo, who met in college and have been married for 41 years, seem to be bantering their way through life, even when they remember the “couple of fights” they had while building the house. The big one? John didn’t want closets because they would partition the house more than he preferred. “I wanted to keep the bigger architecture readable,” he says. Their shared closet is beyond walk-in—a large panel of semisheer fabric is all that separates it from the master bath. Marcia also likes to rib John about the concrete floors, an integral part of the house’s minimalist look but not so hospitable to her feet. “The biggest challenge was finding the right flip-flops!” says Marcia, adding, “Don’t you think I was the easiest client you ever had?”
“Yes,” responds John.
“You have to say that.”
Of course, it’s hard to imagine many paying clients being so easy—or patient—with a project that took so long to pull off. Before the Cohens bought the 25-acre property, it had been on and off the market for about 20 years. One reason other buyers may not have seen the potential of the land was the huge eucalyptus grove standing between the road and the outlandish views. “We walked to the edge of the property, we looked over, and went, ‘This is it,’” remembers Marcia.
But the fact that the property is located in the Toro Canyon Planning Area subjected the building to some of the most stringent reviews in the county. It would be four years before the Cohens got through the process of permitting and design approvals. Because they removed 21 oak trees from the site, they had to be replaced at a 10-to-1 ratio. And those 210 new oaks, all of which are currently tiny seedlings dotting the property, must live a minimum of four years. “And they [the county] even have a bond they’re keeping to make sure that happens, and they don’t give you interest on the bond,” says Marcia. “Of course, it’s good science behind it.”
While some of the eucalyptus were cut down to open up the views, much of them had to be removed to reduce the amount of flammable plant material in the fire-prone canyon. The house itself is environmentally sensitive: Some of the trees, for example, were milled on-site and used for design details inside the house. And the concrete, which was mixed in a process that releases fewer toxic compounds, reduces heating costs because it retains warmth from the day’s sun.
Two years after starting to build—“the review committee loved the design,” says John—the Cohens moved in late 2009 and celebrated with a big housewarming party. They’ve since become involved with UCSB as supporters of Arts & Lectures and recently hosted a party for speaker E.O. Wilson, the famed biologist, at their house. They mostly enjoy being at home, watching the birds that flock to the canyon, picking the “giant” chanterelles that grow there, building a hiking trail (“it’s my golf,” says John), and being amused by each other and by life. “It was a gamble to move to a place where we knew no one,” says Marcia, “but we’ve done things impulsively our whole lives. We do it and we go, ‘What have we done?’ It was a real labor of love.”