By Carolyn Barnes

Town Crier Correspondent

This home exudes architectural serenity

When Charles Stewart of Portola Valley, as a young architect, visited Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s drafting classes at Illinois Tech in the 1940s, he knew he’d found his design guru.

“I saw what he was doing and knew that was the real me,” Stewart said. Architect of the famous Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois, van der Rohe also designed the Seagram building in New York City and other landmarks of modern architecture in the United States and Europe, all noted for their rhythmic, careful grid of design elements.

Stewart’s ambition, throughout a 20-year career with Skidmore Owings Merrill architectural firm, first in Chicago (his birthplace) and then in San Francisco, was eventually to create a home for his own family that incorporated van der Rohe’s design principles. Then, in 1969, Stewart found the perfect three-acre parcel in Portola Valley and built the house of his dreams.

His home has been featured in a Sunset house design book and also in “They Chose to be Different: Unusual California Homes” by Chuck Crandall, Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 1972.

“I drew up the plans pretty fast - in three or four weeks; I took pictures right away, and my wife and son were very enthused,” Stewart said. “You always start out with the placement of the driveway and ask, where do you put the car, the garage and the house entry?”

For the house itself, Stewart wanted a design that would provide the most efficiency and convenience for normal family life, while taking full advantage of the spectacular, heavily wooded site, which also has views of Windy Hill.

“The floor-to-ceiling glass makes sense here because the house is so secluded,” he said.

The house is a 60 ft. x 42 ft. rectangle, planned on a 4 ft. x 8 ft. module. Black steel columns, to which the roof and floor fascia are welded, support the building. The illusion is of a pavilion hovering above the ground; in fact, the floor slab is three feet above the ground and contains a radiant heating system.

“The main thing is, this house really works,” Stewart said. “The kitchen, with its big skylight, is in the middle of the house and the key to everything. You can see a grand view of trees from there, and its placement enabled me to keep corridors to a minimum; you’re going through there all the time and don’t have to go around turning on a lot of lights.”

Stewart and his late wife enjoyed eating their meals at the built-in table in the kitchen, facing the woodsy view. With huge asparagus ferns hanging in the corners of the skylight and carefully propagated potted plants on the counters, the kitchen has the airiness of a greenhouse.

After 30 years in the house, the architect/owner is still finding new things to appreciate: “Now I’ll come home very tired after an evening out, and my bedroom and bath are right there off the entry - I don’t have to go through a long hall - it’s compact and homey,” he said.

The entry hall, like every other room, has floor-to-ceiling glass windows looking toward the square entry deck. Its long back wall runs the length of the kitchen, on its opposite side, and creates a backdrop for a hanging woven rug of abstract design, made by a friend. Museum-like displays of sculptures on pedestals, most by Stewart’s son, complete the dramatic hallway.

“I wanted an entry where you see something very inviting - not just two wooden doors,” Stewart said.

The home’s floor plan is completely symmetrical, with three bedrooms and two baths on the right side of the kitchen and a three-sectioned living room/dining room area to the left. A family room, laundry room/pantry, and many walnut-doored storage closets surround the core kitchen area.

“It’s interesting when you start to design,” Stewart said. “Things just fall into place. I oriented the living room to the south because that is the best exposure for a big room, where there is the least penetration of the sun, plus a nice view. On Sunday mornings I eat breakfast there, read the papers and look out at the view.”

The raised entry porch, facing east, doubles as a patio and exactly matches the deck outside the family room, which faces west.

“You can choose sun or shade, any time of the day,” Stewart said.

You can also choose to take a swim in the rectangular swimming pool, set on the north side of the house, where a broad, level outdoor entertainment area is flanked by a naturally planted hillside. Inviting paths lead from this carefully groomed “civilized” area to wooded hiking paths.

An atmosphere of peaceful serenity, both outdoors and indoors, results from an orderly repetition of design elements, like the vertical steel support beams for the roof, and the horizontal roofline of the nearby carport, repeating the home’s horizontal roof line and the carefully clipped hedge running the length of the swimming pool, between the pool and the house.

Indoors, floors are a grid of terrazzo tiles, with natural fiber rugs in the living room and bedrooms; walls are sand-finished plaster painted white, and all wood paneling and cabinetry is walnut. The two bathrooms, which are mirror images of each other, are designed with square, glass mosaic-tiled bathtub areas, ingeniously set around the corner from the marble counters and washbasins, guaranteeing privacy even when the doors are open.

Furniture throughout the house is kept to a minimum.

Stewart points out, “This chair is by Charles and Ray Eames,” or “This table and chairs are by Eero Saarinen,” as he walks through his home, proving that his love of classic modern furniture is as strong as his love for modern architecture.

“When I had my own office in San Francisco, I was in the same building with Florence Knoll and was able to buy some of her pieces,” he said. And his admiration for modern art is equally strong - so much so, that he has copied at least two important oil paintings by certain unnamed masters and hung them in prominent places in his home.

“I find things I like and I copy them,” Stewart said with a smile.

He also delights in invention. On the Saarinen dining table are four elegantly simple glass candleholders that complement the rich restraint of the room, which is surrounded by lush greenery in the woods beyond the windows. But the “glass” is really a sawed-off plastic soda-pop bottle, turned upside down and set into a tinfoil-covered toilet-paper roll. Stewart gets as much of a kick out of explaining his inventive candleholders as he does from explaining his house designs.

In fact, he is still occasionally drawing up house plans for friends at the drafting table in his study, which faces the swimming pool area. He also enjoys gardening as often as possible.

“I’m out there every morning, cutting, digging, trimming,” he said. “And this week I’ve been planting a lot of iris by the pool.”

The future of his home is a question he has been grappling with lately. One possibility is to apply for some sort of design landmark designation. Fortunately, Stewart’s love affair with modern architecture has only grown stronger with time - and his classic home has served him well through several different phases of his life.