Stump House

This project won an honorable mention in the 2019 Progressive Architecture Awards

“I like the tension that this seemingly simple encampment brings toward architecture’s contested place in nature. There’s a special conversation between the two that is both lyrical and pragmatic.” —J. Frano Violich, FAIA

When is a house more than just a house? For Stump House, Brooklyn, N.Y.–based Para Project’s latest commission, in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California, the firm was faced with a series of unique constraints—as well as some unique possibilities—that obliged principal Jon Lott and team to work beyond the typical remit of the residential designer. On the one hand, the architects had to contend with local building ordinances that limited construction on the 10-acre parcel to a single 1,200-square-foot domicile, no taller than 40 feet, with an additional 1,000 square feet permitted for an adjoining “uninhabitable” structure. In a sly move, the team responded by stacking one structure atop the other, designating the lower level as an art studio (ergo, uninhabited) and embedding it halfway into the sloping terrain. The result is a combined live-work space under a single roof that still accords with both the building height and usage regulations.

Yet turning half of a house into a not-house was only one part of the designers’ canny gamesmanship. Sitting in a clearing, perched on a series of composite stone stumps and topped by a gabled roof, the design gestures toward the most primal ideation of the human dwelling place. It then carries out a calculated assault on that ideation, cutting a glazed skylight in the roof, warping the eave on one side till it almost touches the ground, and sticking services inside the stone stumps, transforming them from existential markers of “place-ness” into a doorway, a closet, a shower and even a gutter. In its conceptual and practical aspects alike, Para’s solution represents an aptly para-architectural coup, an investigation of the a priori conditions of the brief that throws in a few playful curveballs without sacrificing any of the elegance or comfort of this rustic backwoods retreat. —I.V.

Project Credits
Project: Stump House, Ben Lomond, Calif.
Client: Withheld
Architect: Jon Lott / PARA Project, Brooklyn, N.Y. . Jon Lott, AIA, Justin Gallagher, Kenneth Hasegawa, Lauren McClellan, Josephine Roubert (design team)
Contractor: MG Custom
Size: 2,200 square feet
Cost: Withheld