Two Wells

Two open wells, both nineteenth century, both still holding water, sat a hundred and thirty feet apart on land that had been an orchard until 2004. The brief asked for them to be retained. The architects made them the datum. The house is two pavilions, one over each well, connected by a covered walk that runs precisely along the line between them. Neither well is built over. Each sits in an open court at the heart of its pavilion, curbed in sandstone and left uncovered. Water in the eastern well is at thirteen feet in June and about twenty-six in March; you can see the change from the dining table. Sandstone came from a quarry near Santa Paula and is laid exposed, coursed, with a deep raked joint that reads almost black in low light. Floors are black polished concrete, ground in place over four days by a crew that does maybe six houses a year. The walnut in the joinery came out of a schoolhouse in Santa Barbara that was demolished in 2018. Five bedrooms, but they are not equal: two in the east pavilion and three in the west, with the walk between them long enough that the arrangement genuinely works for two generations. The corten screens on the western elevation have finished weathering and no longer stain the paving beneath them. An acre and a third in Ojai with mature oaks and adjudicated water rights. That combination is now essentially unrepeatable.