I’m in the process of building a house for myself alongside the edge of a cliff. The best view of the Carquinez bridge is had from there, so that’s where the house is going. A couple of people have expressed concern about building so near a cliff. Like I’m not going to do something about that!
These waterside cliffs in Benicia are made of stone and are pretty sturdy. That’s why they’re cliffs and not eroded slopes. But it’s sandstone – among the weaker of the stones – and I was determined to “build for the ages.” I want this house to be coveted forever. By that, I mean that as long as humans exist and there is some sort of gathering of humanoids living at this bend of the river, I want my house to be sought after for its grace and livability. My ego requires that. It will be my contribution to the ongoing play that is human life on Earth.
Trenches were dug two feet deep to receive concrete for the foundation because my soil engineer determined that’s where the sturdy sandstone is. But then I did something extra out by the cliff. Eighteen inch diameter holes were drilled ten feet deeper into the ground at key spots under the foundation to be filled with reinforcing steel rebar.
A couple days after the concrete was poured, the wood forms were stripped to reveal a strong concrete foundation ready to receive the wood framing that would become my house. The concrete piers that I was so proud of were now completely hidden underground with no clue at all to suggest their existence. No one but me would ever think of them again, at least not for an awful long time. Inevitably chunks of the hillside will someday spall off into the water. A hundred years from now? Five hundred? It doesn’t matter, because these concrete piers will support my house even when the cliff does not.
I very much like to believe that some of the houses we are building these days will be admired by future generations for the quality of life they provide. Not all houses will be loved, but the ones that are laid out with extra care will be. It’s sort of like the way that a two hundred year old farmhouse in Massachusetts might be sought after today by a modern family.
I recently watched a documentary about Pixar Films that showed how the computer animators struggled mightily in the early days to create the best possible movie. Some wag there coined the phrase: “Pain is temporary. Film is forever.”
Hmm, thought I. That’s sort of what I have going on too. A house design may not be experienced by millions like a film, but for the generations of occupants who will pass their lives inside it, it’s far more important than a two-hour movie. There’s a lot at stake here! Extra effort on my part now will create untold benefit for generation after generation.
If I decide, on a hunch, that I can do better on a hallway arrangement and, after ten or fifteen minutes, hit on a way that the doors are positioned to eliminate a sightline between the master bedroom and the kids bedroom, I just made the world a slightly better place. That was fifteen minutes well spent, I’d say. In the year 2127 a teenage boy named Winston will have a chance at a better relationship with his parents, Howard and Clarisse, because they will not be looking into each other’s private space every time a bedroom door is left open. Plus, by rearranging that hallway, I made it so the other kid’s bedroom now has three different walls where a bed can go and young daughter Lucinda will get to indulge her whims as a designer by rearranging her room from time to time and, in this small way, will feel more fulfilled with her life.
Something like this will happen with each family that occupies this house for hundreds of years! All because I had a hunch and put in a little more effort! (I know. Pretty braggy sounding of me. Hey, I’m just trying to promote the idea that extra effort goes a long way in the high stakes game of house design.)
The way humans live will certainly change as decades and centuries go on, but a bedroom will always be valuable as a place to have as one’s own domain for sleep and other private activities. No matter what technology does for human life, it won’t eliminate the need for humans to have private cozy places as well as open airy places in their homes.
So, we make sure to get the “flow” right for the house and then we make sure it’s going to be waterproof and withstand earthquakes and such. In my case, that needs to include the threat of a cliff eroding beneath it.
The march of geology being undeniable, there will come a time when bits of my hillside will indeed fall away and the Dining Room of my house will be cantilevered outward over space. The occupant at the time will surely freak out about this terrible occurrence. That is until someone looks underneath and notices that the foundation has extra deep concrete piers right where needed. I foresee someone exclaiming something like “Holy moley! Can you believe it! (Laughs out loud.) The guy put friggin’ concrete reinforcements under the house! Far out!” (Or the twenty-third century equivalent of this language.)
And then I won’t be the only one who ever thought about those extra piers.
“No need to thank me,” I will say now to this human not yet born. “Your giddy laughter and your twenty-third century equivalent of ‘high fives’ are thanks enough for me.”
I’m just happy to help, sir or ma’am. In the language of the “Dead Poets Society”: The powerful play goes on and I got to contribute a verse.

Steve McKee is a Benicia architect.
He can be reached on the web at: www.smckee.com or at (707) 746-6788
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