modest fame

Rumford fireplace in the kitchen

Michael and I were in California recently and had a chance to meet the architect Alex Riley at his home in Napa. We appreciated the opportunity to ask him some questions and learn more about our home's building process and history. He generously showed us around his home and studio and shared some photos of our house during the building process.

One of the questions Michael had was regarding the two fireplaces in the house. They are tall and shallow with a beehive-like design. Mr. Riley explained that they are Rumford fireplaces, which are the most efficient at heating up a room with minimal heat lost up the chimney and minimal smoking. They are beautiful fireplaces. The one in the kitchen reminds me of an 18th century kitchen hearth. Mr. Riley built a little nook in the kitchen where one can sit in the winter with a cup of coffee by the fire.

We also learned that our home was featured not once, but three times in Architectural Digest. The first article was published in March 1986. We have a copy of this issue, but I found the article online at the website of Roger Harned, the man credited for the interior design in the article. You can view the article here.

The second article, published in August 1986, featured the home on the cover of the Italian edition of Architectural Digest. Mr. Riley had a copy somewhere in his studio but was unable to find it while we were there. I've done some research to try to find that issue with little luck. I did find a copy had sold recently on Ebay Italy and e-mailed the vendor to find out if he can find another one for me.

The third article was published in a special edition "The AD 100 Architects" issue in 1991. Mr. Riley was named one of the top 100 architects in the world (alongside Frank Gehry and John Lautner, two other architects we admire) based on his design of our home. I found a copy of this issue on Ebay and we are eagerly waiting for it to show up in our mailbox.

discovery

One Saturday morning , I was browsing through the real estate section of the newspaper and saw this ad. I showed it to Michael.

"We have to go check this place out," I said to him as I pointed to it in the paper.

He looked at it and said, "It's out of our price range but it looks weird. Let's go!"

One of our shared hobbies is looking at interesting real estate. We love to see old houses--restored or not--and modern houses with unusual designs. We skip the tract houses and houses that have no character. We like to see how houses are situated on a property, how they are designed and the details that go into making them unique.

After breakfast, we pulled out our Tucson Street Index and headed up Catalina Highway to the road that the house was on. We passed three "For Sale" signs before we found one that had the realtors' names on it. We pulled onto a dirt driveway and wound our way to the front of the house. The first thing I saw was the weird little spire of a chimney which reminded me of something out of a Dr. Seuss book. It was cylindrical and slightly misshapen, like it had been hand-sculpted from clay. Our eyes widened as we took in the great curve of the house, the gray cement, the tall windows and front door. Michael hadn't yet stopped the car and I was already out of it, scrambling towards the entrance. He quickly followed.

We were both quiet at first, then gushing with excitement. This house was stunning. And exactly like something Michael would build, if he had thought of it. We had been married only three months and Michael was already drawing up plans for our dream house. Not being an architect, he had spent weeks looking online for house plans that would reflect our tastes. He found something he could work with and began modifying the rooms, trying to create roundness amidst all the square shapes. I especially wanted a round kitchen, which we occasionally saw in magazines. He already owned an acre lot in town that we could build on, though it wasn't ideal; it was too close to a major road, there were two houses on a hill overlooking the lot, and any view of the mountains was ruined by massive power lines cutting across the foreground. Now we were standing before a house that was one great crescent. As we walked around it, peering into every window possible, we saw only more curves inside. It had a round kitchen. It was perfect.


Michael immediately called the realtor to see if she could show us the house. She couldn't come that day, so we made an appointment for the following afternoon.

From the moment we saw it, I think we both knew this was it. We had been looking for a "dump in the desert" that we could get for a good price and fix up on our own. Though it was more than we had hoped to pay, we couldn't not buy it. Michael did some financial finagling and we made an offer.

From that day on, we acted as if it were already ours. We would go there on the weekends with wine and cheese and crackers and picnic in the backyard. Michael brought a ladder on the fourth of July and we watched the distant fireworks from the roof. We made plans. Two months later, it was ours.