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The Wow! factor is high at 949 Toro Canyon Road. Like Persian pavilions, their roofs shimmering pools, this extraordinary series of edifices arch like inviting stepping stones up the rough canyon walls. But this is no typical Santa Barbara home built of native materials and filled with antiques and fine art. Rather it is an erector set fantasia built entirely of cold, hard steel, concrete, and plaster, components of our industrial age alien to this landscape.
I recall Coleridge's poem of Xanadu where Kubla Khan a "pleasure dome decreed" but my fantasy ends in the driveway where award winning architect Barton Myers greets me in shorts and an old T-shirt, a mysterious Japanese bag about his neck.
To the west I hear the creek bustling down the steep canyon, past hundred year old oak trees, seeking its way from the mountains to the sea. On the horizon are the Channel Islands. A single electrical pylon on the ridge interrupts a reverie that these forty acres, wild, and free, are a bit of the forest primeval snatched from heaven and planted above Montecito. Mountain lions, coyotes, and rattlesnakes call it home.
But as Myers invites me into his home to meet his wife Vicki, the CFO of his L.A. based firm, I see that here nature is part of, not backdrop to the buildings. There don't seem to be any windows, or even any walls. Their living room simply stretches uninterrupted into a terrace. Here we sit and sip iced expressos in the shade of the trees looking out over the Zen garden terrace. Beyond the reflecting pools above the garage and guest house, the Pacific spreads like a continuous watery dream and offers its jewels, the Channel Islands. A breeze from the ocean dreamily caresses our skin. Tranquility and peace are palpable. I don't want to leave.
A pioneering architect and Virginia native, Myers began his career in Canada, designing mass produced pre-fabricated buildings as homes for steel company workers. But then he found a niche ideally suited to his own unique ability to mix fact and fantasy, steel and spirit. Beginning with The Citadel in Edmonton, Alberta, Myers embarked on a series of award winning designs for innovative theatres. Belying its fortress invoking name, The Citadel returns to the intimate ambiance of 19th Century theatres with both a 700 seat main auditorium and a smaller 300 seat theatre. But it is best known, however, for its quarter mile glass atrium with classrooms on the upper level where young artists going about their studies and rehearsals are visible to pedestrians in the street below.
Myers followed with the 2700 seat New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark with its glass lobby, copper rotunda, and exposed steel beams celebrating the city's industrial past. Most recently his design for The Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts here in southern California features moveable walls able to create five different theatre configurations from the intimate to the cavernous. The late Frank Sinatra opened the Center calling it "the most beautiful I've ever seen" and, before a capacity crowd, calling on Myers to stand and take a bow.
Having designed stages for so many other artists Myers brought much the same sense of drama to designing his own home. He saw Toro Canyon he told me: Like a temple site, ancient and untouched. It gave birth to this house. The canyon supplied the walls so I didn't need too. The large sectional doors and all of the windows roll up and out of the way so there's a seamless integration of indoors and out. Not one of these beautiful oak trees had to be cut. The result is a 360 degree panoramic view of mountains and ocean.
Completed in 1999, the home consists of four buildings one above the other which leap frog up the hill. Myers' studio is at the top, with the 2800 square foot main house below, followed by the garage and a guest house.
I'm taken by the Islamic-Spanish heritage, which, unlike our Puritan ancestors, invites nature into the domestic sphere. All the building materials are off the shelf and low tech. This is a new way to make the California house. In fact, it's a green way to build. You see, all of this steel is recycled. I'm building with what used to be Ferraris, Masseratis, and Pontiacs.
But what about the inherent beauty of natural building materials like wood, or the Spanish tiles, stucco, and terra cotta inherent in the Santa Barbara look, I ask. "Oh not the terrible Tuscanys", Myers joked and then assumed a professorial air: "After all steel has its beauties. You can see how it's milled, galvanized, how it takes on a patina over time and how the colors emerge with weathering. And, unlike wood, steel stands up to the canyon's greatest threat: fire". Indeed the galvanized rolling steel shutters, like the doors on a fire station, can be manually lowered to cover every opening of the house. "With the shutters down", says Myers. "we're safely cocooned."
Pools of water cover three of the four building roofs, providing a lap pool, reflecting ponds reminiscent of a Turkish garden, and, more practically, water reservoirs for fire fighting. "I get fan mail from the fire marshall and insurance agents", says Myers.
In addition Myers cleared the chaparral from around the buildings and planted a grape vineyard, blood oranges, olive trees and vetiveria grass whose deep roots stymie erosion.
Their home is a magnet now for art tours up from L.A. , with some 90 visitors just last week. And it's drawing commissions to design new homes. "I never had house clients till now", Myers tells me, and in these new jobs I can keep pushing the envelope."
Out behind his studio sits another steel house, the old Airstream trailer Myers lived in while overseeing construction. When I asked how he got it up there, he replied "Getting it in was easy, but now I can't get it out". I found it reassuring that this master builder hadn't quite thought of everything.
