Category — Real Estate

Healdsburg has an interesting architectural history with ornate Victorians and classic Craftsman era homes downtown interspersed with more humble bungalows, and the rare, but ugly, 1970’s condo complex.

Healdsburg’s Growth Management Program mandates an average of 30 new homes per year. For the past several years, that program has funneled growth into Area A, in the northern part of Healdsburg. Part of the planning was to encourage diversity of style, and that has turned out to be as architecturally interesting as was hoped for when residential development was encouraged in this small, hilly neighborhood.

Almost half of the lots in Area A have been built on, and the Clear Ridge subdivision, which was the first to start building, is looking quite complete. There’s a strong Mediterranean feel in general in this neighborhood, but there’s been a lot experimentation with roofs, wall textures and materials, and styles.

The amount of experimentation is very interesting in itself, and the end result of all the variation adds to the charm and visual interest in these view-rich homes.

At the foot of Clear Ridge Drive where it intersects Poppy Hill a new house is nearing completion that is a beautiful example of the designer’s vision. Stone foundations with natural wood siding and copper flashing and gutters are traditional elements that are used to great effect by the designer. The repetitive roof planes and eaves are beautiful. For my taste, this is one of the most elegant and timeless houses in Healdsburg.

If you have some time on one of these harvest weekends, have a drive through this area to see what’s going on. We do have a couple of buildable lots for sale if you think you might like to live in the neighborhood.

We all do visual double takes. Is that a Llama or goat or what? For all of us it’s a familiar experience, particularly since life is zooming by and we usually don’t have time to see things carefully the first time. When I looked at this property the first time I certainly made a bunch of assumptions that didn’t turn out to be true. I got one right, but I’ll tell you about that after I confess my mistakes.

By the way, the mistakes I made are why I ended up liking this Watertrough Road four acre parcel in Sebastopol so much. It fooled me several times as I would first label it and then have to change my mind once I got to know a little more about it. The learning process helped me understand all the great things about this place that the quick glance and premature labeling would have made me miss. So not only do I come out liking the property a lot, but it reminded me to wait before passing judgment. That’s almost always a good idea.

The first thing to hit you when you arrive is there’s no place to park. There is a modest driveway, but even one parked van can block access for a second vehicle. So you park down the road or in a neighbor’s driveway and think “inaccessible”. At least, that’s what my labeling mind did. The reality that I missed is that not only is there a long driveway with plenty of room beyond the gate, but there’s a completely separate access along the edge of the property that could lead to a new estate home site. Fortunately, Cory Maguire, the listing agent, was able to straighten me out. Oops.

My second thought was dryness and sparseness. The area around the house doesn’t have much grass and there’s not a lot of underbrush. As you probably guessed by now, wrong again.

Cory led me on a tour down the length of this gently eastward sloping land, and she pointed out both the ample dry grass underfoot and the hardy fruit trees that have endured irrigation-free summers and still managed to put out bumper crops of apples and pears. The grass free areas are a result of the owner’s alpaca herd doing what animals do the world over. Eat grass. Or pears. Oops.

This is fertile land, Goldridge sandy loam, that would support grapes, organic gardens, horses, or any other commercial or family 4-H activity you can think of. It’s zoned DA which is Sonoma County’s most flexible designation. If you’re thinking of a 4-H place the other thing you should know is that the school here, Twin Hills, is a very fine place to send your children. Great parents and teachers working together to make sure all the kids get a good education.

Before you think I was a complete loon about this property I have to say that I got one label correct. The first thought I had on seeing the buildings and fences was “fixer”. I was right about that. However, don’t let the general air of structural decrepitude mask the true character of this four acre gem from your sight. Keep in mind that the 1920’s farmhouse can keep it’s claim in Sebatopol history as a granny and a main dwelling further down the property can be built. Give me a call or send me an email and I’ll arrange a tour for you and we can talk about the field of dreams you would build here. Dave Roberts 707-869-1884.  - SORRY, THIS GREAT PROPERTY IS SOLD

And in case you missed the clues, those are alpacas in the top picture.

It was beautiful driving weather today, so I thought I’d check out some fixers along Bodega Highway. Northwood Golf Club is a beautiful spot for a little recreation, but I didn’t have time for nine holes, let alone eighteen, so I just stopped to admire the redwood shaded grass for a minute and headed west. I took a quick detour into Monte Rio since I remembered a pretty gate at the Village Inn that would help flesh out my gate postings.

Just as I rememberd, this iron gate was roofed in foliage that was echoed at an interior courtyard gate. This inn is nestled in the redwoods along the banks of the Russian River so it doesn’t really need the addition of a green oasis like an urban location might, but we believe in plenty of nature in west Sonoma County.

If a couple of measly redwoods don’t give you enough plant material in your life, you can stick some plants on your fence and gates…and add some planters for good measure. Actually, all kidding aside, the “doorness” created by the ivy in the gate is an important element to add human scale to the environment, particularly in a redwood forest that reaches so high into the sky. The gate in the first photo is just visible on the lower left of this image and you can get a sense for the sheer size of the redwoods, both height and girth. The Village Inn has done a good job at building a comfortable and cozy environment within the redwoods.

I was creating some graphic headers for this site and realized that I had just made a whole bunch of pictures of entropy in action. I could do a complicated discussion of the second law of thermodynamics, but you can read that here if you’re interested. From our real world perspective, entropy is iron rusting, roofs sagging, paint peeling, and all the other signals that what was once orderly is becoming chaotic. The effects of gravity, rain, freezing, and other natural processes are at work on our buildings from the day they are completed. We only need to do a few things well to keep our shelters functioning well. Here’s your short list of absolutely positively should do tasks.

Stay Dry. It’s a simple command. Harder to do than it sounds, however, since nature is hard at work trying to sneak water into your building systems. Rain, flood, groundwater, low house elevation, and high winds work on bad shingles, missing ridges, clogged gutters, improper flashing, leaking doors and windows, bad weatherstripping, ineffective corner trim, bad building paper installation, and I’m just getting started with the external threats. Actually, that’s almost a complete list, but most of your major water problems are going to start with something in the first half dozen items. What’s illustrated very clearly in this photo is a roof with half the shingles missing. When the rain starts falling directly on your plywood, you are looking at some serious entropy, baby. I’d rather have a blue tarp than a shingle-less roof.

This sad structure is missing more than one window. The roof could be in perfect condition, but open windows are going to let in the rain and once that starts, it’s not gonna be good. What happens is that the wall and the floors both start to suffer expansion and contraction and materials like wallboard (sheetrock) and cheap trim materials start to decay almost immediately. It doesn’t take very long before structural damage to wall studs, floor joists, and subfloor materials starts to happen.

This is a great example of a floor and wall framing intersection that has suffered a catastrophic amount of water damage. Click on the image (or any image on this blog) for a large image of rot that’s beyond repair. Water did this. It does it all the time. Stay Dry!

One of the saddest things we experience in the real estate business is a building collapse due to the inability of heirs to make decisions on maintenance issues. There are frequently urgent needs for roof repairs that were deferred during the final years before someone passes. Some heirs want to sell and others may want to fix and others just don’t know and before anyone notices, the building has already fallen into complete ruin. Everybody loses when that happens, so if you find yourself arguing about what to do with Grandma’s house some day, just remember entropy and get the blue tarps ready.

I headed up to Occidental where I needed to get pictures of some of the Italian style family restaurants for an article Wild Jane is writing on the main sonoma.net site. I made sure to get photos of both the Union Hotel and the classic Howard’s Cafe two blocks up the street. The Union Hotel is a whole complex of buildings including a pizzeria, saloon, ballroom, and a residence at the end of the street. I had mentioned a few posts back how gates can be used as inviting features within a longer property divider. This mixed residental and commercial fence is a useful reminder that in a town with busy restaurants and saloons, the good citizens living next door probably want some peace and quiet.

There isn’t a residential break apart from the driveway in this long fence. It’s a fairly elegant “stay out” sign. There is, of course, a pretty gate into the restaurant’s courtyard and a driveway gate for the residence.

Howard’s Cafe is a beautifully converted residence with great original detailing on the lower and upper covered porches and eaves. It’s a lovely spot and one of my favorite breakfast hangouts on Sunday when I can get away. If you get a chance to stop by, have a look at the detailing on the upper porch beam where they echo the post-top detailing in the middle of the span. It’s a nice touch that you absolutely won’t see in production building today. Of course, you’re not there just to look at the architecture. The food really is great.

The builders also created a very intricate detail at the eaves that’s a little busy for my taste, but it’s certainly a great example of what pattern books, the power saw and an abundance of wood made possible. Sort of like desktop publishing in 1986…too many fonts, colors, and styles, but hey, see what I can do.

The Potter Schoolhouse in Bodega is one of the few remaining buildings from Alfred Hitchcock’s filming of “The Birds”. It’s been a schoolhouse, bed and breakfast, and private residence. I’m a fan of the simple symmetry of the building with the round-top windows, corner columns, and octagonal tower. It’s a timeless building without the gingerbread of a Queen Anne or the stripped down plainness of the Craftsman style. There are a couple of other buildings in Bodega that I really like.

This simple residence features dramatic yellow painted quoins which are elements that were traditionally used to imitate how stone walls meet at corners. These wooden quoins are common in buildings of the late 1800’s and appear in everything from a Italianate to a Queen Anne to this plainer example. One of my favorite fixers on North St in Healdsburg shares this detail.

The final gem on my trip was this attractive two story, two porch farmhouse behind a white picket fence. The eaves, porches, and windows all have nice detailing that is highlighted by the simple horizonal siding. The relatively steep, hipped roof and arched windows make this a good example of an Italianate style building. Just outside the picket fence is this old weathered sign which probably proclaimed this as an inn or commercial establishment. Now it’s a great example of the forces of nature on human construction.

I’ve bemoaned the loss of stone and brick as building materials due to earthquakes. We end up with a lot of faux walls where a thin stone veneer is glued to concrete block or even wood framing. This Freestone property has always had one of the most beautiful wooden fences in Sonoma County. They are in the process of adding a stone entrance to the property and we can see the solution for an earthquake resistant stone wall.

If you look carefully at the large image you get from clicking on the thumbnail, you’ll see that the stone being used here is real, and almost half a foot thick. You’ll see the reinforcing steel emerging from the earthquake resistant reinforced concrete block wall that becomes the bond that ties the rock and concrete block together. It’s not cheap to build this way, but it’s the only way to get an authentic stone wall that will pass building codes and remain standing when the next big one rumbles by. I tip my hat to the V bar C folks for doing it right, and for keeping that beautiful fence intact.

One other facet of the changing face of Sonoma County emerged when I was taking a picture of the wooden fence. If you look carefully at the upper right corner of the image (click to enlarge), just past the stump-sliced V bar C sign, you’ll see some of the most westerly grapevines in Sonoma County marching down the hillside. Ten years ago this would have been considered outside the range of grape growing climate. Now it’s home to the lovely Pinot Noir.

Twin Valley, home of the Macmurray Ranch used to have the most wonderful trimmed redwoods. The underside of the trees along the fence line of their western pasture used to be groomed as crisply as a golf course green…just upside down. It was the cows, of course, reaching as high as they could to nibble on the emerging green redwood needles. I’m embarassed to say it, but it took me longer than it should have to see the cause and effect relationship. As I was driving through Freestone today I noticed this willow tree with an equally crisp bottom trim job. Alert observers will see not just the standing cow, but her partner in inverted mowing laying down on the job.

Freestone is a charming hamlet. Osmosis Spa, an inn, a great bakery, a rhododendron nursery across the road, and a classic general store are a few of the businesses here where the road to Occidental intercepts the Bodega Highway. There’s also the world’s most over-built foundation. I’m not sure how this came to be, but I’ve never seen a water tank with such a forest of massive timbers holding it up. It would make an interesting challenge at Berkeley’s school of engineering to see if they could figure out just how much this foundation could hold.

My first significant earthquake came while I was sitting on an under-construction deck in Berkeley. The deck, still unbraced, stood still while the house it was attached to swayed pretty vigorously. It was an interesting demonstration of Newton’s Law that a body at rest tends to stay at rest unless acted on by an outside force. That same earthquake that couldn’t twitch my deck was strong enough to move parts of California a few inches North and knock down stone walls.

Structural engineers have studied earthquakes and their effect on structures and can make just about any building designed today both safe and durable in an earthquake. Sadly, some of our most beautiful building materials are terrible choices for earthquake country. I did a quick walking tour around Railroad Square in Santa Rosa today and was admiring the many older buildings that featured stone and brick. The Hotel La Rose is a beautiful stone building of three stories that was built of locally quarried basalt in 1907, a year after the big quake in San Francisco that also knocked down much of Santa Rosa. Just around the corner from the hotel is the Jacobs building. Lots of tenants have occupied this building and Capri, one of our favorite Italian restaurants, was on the ground floor. We still miss Luigi.

The clinker brick facade of this Railroad Square landmark has a wonderfully authentic color and rustic feel and that isn’t achievable with stucco, wood, or any of the faux masonry products that get glued onto the exteriors of buildings today. So the answer to the question, “Why do earthquakes suck” has to be that they deny us some of the traditional architectural materials that have been around for millenia. It’s still possible to design with brick appearance as the JC parking lot attests, but that’s a public works job with a mega budget. For the average residential and commercial builder, real stone and real brick are expensive ornamentation devoid of any structural significance. Thanks a lot, earthquakes…

I posted recently about two lovely entrances in the Russian River town of Guerneville. I wanted to broaden my rustic selections to include two urban entrances in Healdsburg near the famed Healdsburg Plaza. Both of these are on Center Street half a block down from the Oakville Grocery. The first entry is a classic American white picket fence. The Saggio Hills office features extra detailing on the pickets including a routed groove down the center and well shaped tips. The entrance itself has double swinging gates, usually left open to invite people inside. The gate is tree shaded with a hint of roof feeling, echoing the full arbor we saw on the rustic wooden Guerneville gate. The pickets repeat the vertical railing on the porch as a strong architectural element. If Saggio Hills executes as well on their high end development as they have on their downtown office, it will be a welcome addition to Healdsburg’s resort reputation.

The Barn Diva walking entrance features a thick, square-cornered stone wall entry capped by plants flanking either side. Unlike the continuous hedge in the stone wall from the Armstrong Woods area, these accent plants highlight the entry, but don’t block the view of the restaurant or courtyard from passersby. The wall is a comfortable height for seated privacy in the courtyard, but isn’t a visual barrier to the doors and windows of the restaurant. There is an iron gate that is closed in this photo, and the restaurant was closed as well. The gate serves as a convenient way to indicate the availability of service. Menus and hours of operation are posted on the wall along the sidewalk for the convenience of the public.

Farther down the road is a driveway for Barn Diva accented by a taller iron gate, more appropriate to vehicles than people. The gate is set into the same thick stone wall but is large enough to physically block access to people and vehicles. Behind the gate you can see the vertical landscape elements that pick up the vertical siding on the architecturally interesting Barn Diva building.

Both of these entrances serve commercial establishments well. They are open and inviting when required, and closeable, but not intimidating, when their businesses aren’t open. All of the entrances we’ve looked at feature smart planting to emphasize “doorness” in their walls with plant materials that include flowers, hedge materials, and trees. Let me know if you see a great entrance in your neighborhood.