The Courtyard of Nine Trees

The survey recorded nine mature trees on the lot: four coast live oak, three sycamore, a walnut and a single very old California bay near the north boundary. The client's brief permitted the removal of two. The architects removed none. What resulted is a plan that is frankly odd on paper and entirely legible in person. The house is a loose ring of rooms with a courtyard at the center, but the ring is not a rectangle; it bulges and pinches around root zones, and three of the trees are inside the building footprint, growing up through openings in the roof with a clear collar around each trunk. This creates maintenance the owner should understand: leaves fall inside the house, the collars need clearing before the rains, and two of the openings have removable covers for the worst weeks. In exchange, the courtyard has a canopy that took forty years to grow and could not be bought. Wire-cut brick, exposed and unrendered, with galvanized steel for all the roof structure so the junctions where the roof meets a trunk could be adjusted on site. Gray polished concrete floors run continuously between inside and courtyard with no threshold. The bay is the oldest thing on the property by a wide margin and has a seat built around it, which the architects have said publicly was the only sentimental decision in the project.