There are a few American houses that seem to sum up, under one roof, the fashions and frustrations of the architecture of their moment.
The Los Angeles architect Frank Israel has built one of those houses here. His Drager House, completed last year, is already the most talked-about of the notorious new “fire zone houses” that are replacing the more than 2,600 homes destroyed by the 1991 Berkeley-Oakland Hills fire.
It is hard to imagine a more bizarre home construction site than the Berkeley Hills fire zone four years after the fire. A few streets into the hills, the vegetation suddenly stops. Gargantuan new houses crowd together on the naked hillside, testimony to the fire victims’ desire to build as many square feet as the new zoning laws allow.
Remains of dead trees and charred foundations make a surreal backdrop. In this inhospitable setting, Israel’s Drager house stands out as an oasis, one of a handful of structures with real architectural presence.
The Drager house is itself a mega-house, with 4,500 square feet on three levels and including three bedrooms, five bathrooms and a separate housekeeper suite and a two-car garage.
But what is seen from the street is a tightly composed copper and gray-green stucco sculpture that folds back gracefully into the bare hillside. Its asymmetrical forms are unusual enough to be poetic, without seeming outlandish. It is a recognizably Los Angeles style, but what does that matter, since the neighborhood has lost every trace of local character?
When an old friend from New York suggested Israel, known for his designs for Los Angeles entertainment and art-world clients, Dr. Sharon Drager’s first reaction was “But he only builds for celebrities.”
“Frank was here a month after the fire,” she added. “I was still very depressed. He looked at the site and told me I could have a fabulous house. I trusted him.”
Often called by his architectural peers the most gifted and erudite of his generation, Israel, 49, is noted for his affinity for abstract forms and for a palette of earth tones that imbues them with warmth.
“But here was a site that looked like an Anselm Kiefer painting,” he said. “We had to treat it abstractly, working with the views, the shape of the hill and the color of the grasses and a few oak trees that had survived.”
Most fire victims simply opted for bigger versions of what they had before. But Drager and her family were different. Drager, 49, is a New York-born vascular surgeon who lives with her daughter, 11, and son, 13.
“I had never thought about building a house,” she said. “With everything else, it just wasn’t on my agenda.” Then she lost her home and all of her possessions in the fire. “I was devastated,” she said. “My way of making myself feel better was to take the opportunity to make something beautiful.”
Drager had precious memories of a Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1964 Shepherd house in New Canaan, Conn., which she had visited years ago. “Not that I wanted that particular house,” she said, “but living with significant architecture seemed like a wonderful thing to do.”
Unlike many of her fellow fire victims, who have populated the bare hillside with Mediterranean, Tudor and Colonial-style mansions, Drager did not hope to bring back the past by duplicating the eclectic masonry and wood-trimmed 1924 two-story home she had lived in since 1984. Nor was she interested in the consolation of luxury materials (the copper shingles are an exception).
“I knew if I kept the materials simple, I could have great architecture for the same price my neighbors were paying,” said Drager. She added, she was not able to give a precise figure for the entire project, but said she thought it was within the $750,000 to $1.5 million range of her neighors’ houses.
The result looks like a three-dimensional collage, with its tipped copper-shingled roof and stepped-back facade in gray-green stucco, glass and cedar. But inside, it feels surprisingly like a traditional family home. Modest-sized rooms interlock in a pattern that is thoughtful but not tortuously complicated. Its old-fashioned solidity, intelligibility, and cheerfulness are welcome in this war-zone atmosphere.
The entrance is by concrete steps up the side that lead to the second floor. Inside, the proportions and plan have echoes of the San Francisco Bay Area’s traditions of domestic architecture. The low-ceilinged entry hall has doors leading to the dining room, kitchen and a sunken living room that overlooks the bay.
But each of these rooms has at least one small, exhilarating surprise. Ceiling heights and window shapes vary. The entry hall is plastered in vibrant aubergine. One wall of the living room is a cut away for views down to the family room and up to the third-floor clerestory windows. In the dining room, a vertical window turns the corner when it joins the ceiling, to become a skylight. Elsewhere in the house, there are peek-a-boo windows of unusual shapes where picture windows would be expected. The kitchen, living room and entry hall are visually connected by slits in the walls.
But the big surprises are on the third floor. Slanted walls enclose the narrow staircase and draw the eye upward to clerestory windows and 14-foot ceilings.
At the top of the stairs, exactly where most people would put a painting, there is a sudden view of the hillside garden, a composition of bright flowering plants framed in a rectangular window. A light-filled front-to-back hallway is the spine of this floor, with its children’s rooms placed symmetrically on either side. But this area was designed for more than visual effect: one end holds a much-used study, with a desk built into one wall.
The master bedroom, also on the third floor, has more surprises. A fireplace occupies the “view” side of the room. One tiny triangular window frames the classic vista of San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge, with larger windows including more of the hills and Oakland.
With its eccentric window shapes, slits, cutouts and slanted walls, the Drager House exhibits all the tricks and tics of recent architectural fashion. But the overall feeling of the interior is not pretentious. For these design flourishes have been subordinated to a clear and pragmatic arrangement of rooms. There are no tour-de-force spaces. No one room dominates the house.
“I hate the `great room.’ I hate `the kitchen that ate the house’ so that you never leave the kitchen. I hate having such huge master bedrooms that there is no space left for the children, who are put in little cubicles with views of a retaining wall.”
Instead, Drager asked Israel and his project architect, Annie Chu, for lots of rooms with privacy and specific uses: a separate dining room for meetings as well as for meals; a housekeeper’s suite with its own entrance; a family room (with the large television) away from the dining and living rooms, and a living room with a place for her daughter’s baby grand piano.
“I believe the living room and separate dining room are endangered species,” Drager said. “I wanted a formal, urbane feeling to the interior of the house.”
