There are so many reasons to want a little house on the Russian River.
For Mark Jensen and Johanna Grawunder, the draw was partly sentimental: Mr. Jensen had spent part of his childhood in the area around Healdsburg, Calif. Also, his San Francisco-based architecture firm, Jensen Architects, had built projects there. And it was an easy hour-and-a-half drive north from the couple’s loft in the city.
“Maybe most important is just that it’s super beautiful,” said Mr. Jensen, 62.
In 2012, the couple, who had a limited budget, looked at unloved properties in the Fitch Mountain neighborhood of Healdsburg. Eventually, they found a vertiginous riverside lot with a house that was in far worse shape than the typical fixer-upper: a condemned, structurally unsound building that had been illegally converted into apartments, with outdoor spaces overgrown by weeds.
“When Mark drove past this one, I was screaming, ‘No, no, no — don’t stop, don’t stop,’” said Ms. Grawunder, 63, who has a degree in architecture and designs exhibitions and light installations. “But after beating through this whole disaster of the ruin that it was, we got out onto this little rickety deck, probably risking our lives, and it was like, ‘Oh, my God.’”
The view, it turned out, was breathtaking.
Demolishing the building, clearing the site, building a new house and resolving the laundry list of violations attached to the property wouldn’t be easy. “But being either clever architects — or naïve and foolish — we thought we could make it work,” Mr. Jensen said.
They closed on the property that October for $148,000. From the outset, they knew they would be limited to building within the footprint of the existing structure. But even before they could develop plans and get the needed permits, they were required to remove the illegal apartments.
“We had to strip it down to where it started before the planning and building department would even talk to us about our remodel,” Mr. Jensen said.
At the same time, he and Ms. Grawunder spent weekends hacking back the overgrown foliage around the house, and were surprised by what was revealed. “We found all these beautiful terraces along the river, with handmade concrete work and embedded abalone shells and tiles,” Mr. Jensen said. “It was like excavating in Pompeii.”
It wasn’t until 2014 that they were finally able to start building their new home. The plan was to keep the exterior concrete work they had discovered, strengthen the existing foundation and erect a small, unfussy house on top.
“We really just wanted some rough-and-tumble loose space we could bang around in,” Ms. Grawunder said. “We didn’t want any preciousness.”
Above a 400-square-foot unfinished basement, they built a 600-square-foot, double-height living space with a 315-square-foot sleeping loft overhead. Because the road is at the top of the lot, which descends all the way to the river, the front door opens into the loft level and a spiral staircase curls down to the main living space.
To build a kitchen, they installed stainless steel base cabinets along one wall. For a work surface, they added a wood trestle table that Mr. Jensen built himself. Rolling carts tucked under the table provide extra storage for pots and pans, and lights are hidden in an open section of ceiling.
A Malm fireplace anchors the living room, and the dining area is organized around a long Quaderna dining table, designed in 1972 by the Italian collective Superstudio. The table is a reminder of the time the couple spent working for the Florence-based architect Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, a founder of Superstudio, in the 1980s.
Most of the construction was complete by 2016, at a cost of about $500,000. But Mr. Jensen and Ms. Grawunder continued to tinker and customize the property over the following years, adding decks and planted terraces.
One deck with a retractable awning runs the full width of the house off the living space. Another, closer to the water, has a floor of metal grates that doubles as a pergola above an outdoor dining space.
“It’s metal grating that’s usually used for stairs, so it’s tough and robust when it floods,” Mr. Jensen said. “But the perforations also make this beautiful dappled light in the space underneath it, which we call the cabana.”
Living on so many levels is appealing, but isn’t always easy. “There are 72 steps between the river and the road,” Mr. Jensen said. “And, inevitably, when we go down to the river to have lunch, we forget something.”
To ease the burden of carting things back and forth, they devised a creative solution: a wicker basket on a rope that can be hoisted from the deck off the primary living space.
Although the house was intended to be a second home, the couple moved in full-time at beginning of the pandemic and turned the basement into a home office. They still have their San Francisco loft, but they now spend most of their time in Healdsburg.
“It’s really hard to jump in the car when I’m here looking at the river and can hike the mountain every day,” Ms. Grawunder said. “I do go to the city, but kind of kicking and screaming, now that we’ve tasted the other side.”
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