Inside a California Home Made From the Mountain It Stands On

[gentle music]

I think you can apply the word genius.

I think anyone that looks at the different spaces

that Ken has created,

sees that they are wonderful, incredible spaces,

but he also understood people

and how they move in a space and what stimulates them

and what can add to their life

from their experience with nature.

These ideas welled up within him.

They were an intuitive response

to the opportunities that he had,

to the land and the water and the air.

My name is Dave Hampton.

I'm a local San Diegan, and I'm an author

of a book called San Diego's Craft Revolution,

and an independent curator.

[birds chirping]

Dr. and Mrs. Joe Bailey are responsible

for the Bailey House, which is northeast of San Diego

in the sort of back country.

He bought raw land in 1972.

Eventually, he and Barbara Bailey together decided

to work with Ken Kellogg.

Ken had a lot of appeal

because he's one of the few native-born San Diegans

to develop a practice here that was informed

by mid-century modern ideas.

Ken also had a handcraft element to his work

and a sculptural element to his work.

Ken Kellogg's architecture had a kind of a roughness

and a kind of a sun and surf sensibility

that there was something

about his growing up next to the Pacific Ocean,

but also having the mountains just 10 or 20 minutes away

that helped him to come up

with his own signature organic architecture.

[birds chirping]

So, Steve Bailey and I are at the front door

of his family home, the Bailey House.

And the door is a important feature

of the artist John Vugrin.

John Vugrin also worked with Ken

on the Kellogg Doolittle house.

It's on a pin system.

It's a custom door.

A locksmith guy just came out to help us

with stuff two weeks ago

and he was like, This is all commercial hardware.

It's super rare.

And you can see how the door is built out sculpturally,

so it's dimensional with this curve

and it's built using laminated individual strips of wood.

The client started out wanting a functional ranch house

that the owner could build himself with their ranch hands,

but what Ken is inspired to come up with

is a really wild, wonderful, complicated design.

Mr. Bailey apparently took this on as a challenge

and built the house himself with helpers,

with ranch hands and a number of different carpenters,

most of whom were referred by Ken,

and they do Ken's designs perfectly,

but the house took a really long time to build.

The rock, when you see the rock work in this house,

it's just amazing.

And it was quarried on the site

from down below this hilltop.

[gentle music]

[Steve] I think my dad spent a lot of time

running the cement mixer for this

because he said he lost a lot of his hearing,

like layer by layer, stack by stack of all these rocks.

[gentle music]

Just inside the front door is a key kind of junction

of the whole house where its two wings meet up.

There's a gap between them that you walk into.

One side has a bedroom, the other side has the living areas,

the kitchen and the living room

and the fireplace and so forth.

What I see a lot in the Bailey House is a maturation

and a kind of a controlling of this language

that Ken had developed in many, many other houses.

So, he's got the circular spaces, he's got the stone work,

he's got the dramatic, dynamic curves

of the roof and the balconies.

He's got all the glass,

he's got all these handmade elements.

[gentle music]

One of the qualities of Kellogg's version

of organic architecture is a deliberate blurring

of the conventional division

between the exterior and the interior.

And so, the idea

that you have your finished interior cabinetry

penetrating the exterior space is unusual

and blurs that distinction between interior and exterior.

But it's a little bit of a struggle

because part of it's outside

and getting hit by the elements.

It is very difficult to maintain outside.

It gets slammed by rain, wind, heat.

We sand and restain it at least every year.

[gentle music]

[Dave] A couple of things about the kitchen

that I think are noteworthy

are that it's really the center point

for all of the structure of the house that you see,

and here is where all these massive laminated beams,

supported on the utility poles,

they all come together in this space.

If you're out in this room,

all these points above you lead you here,

and then it's echoed by the built in table.

Other feature that comes to mind

with this kitchen is the skylight.

It's pretty rad.

My brother and I rode our skateboards in this thing

when it was standing up vertically

and delivered out on the garage.

That was a cool memory that I have of the house definitely.

As the more clean look of woodworking that we associate

with the '40s and '50s in modern furniture design evolved.

They started to talk about something

called the California Roundover

where cabinets and pieces of furniture

had a kind of a curve,

but here it's put into the kitchen

into a more utilitarian environment

and it's floated off the ground,

so everything has space around it,

so they become these discreet, three dimensional,

very sculptural elements.

[gentle music]

There's this idea that's associated with Frank Lloyd Wright,

the idea of a big, hearty fireplace

being the center of the home.

And what you see from Ken throughout his career

is a development of this fireplace

as a key attraction and sculptural element,

a kind of a focal point of the living room.

But he's also highlighting the sculptural form.

There are gaps all around the shape of the fireplace

so that it's completely free standing.

The glass pierces the rock

and the fireplace goes outside and inside at the same time,

and it has these wonderful floating hearth of cast concrete.

It's a way of distinguishing one material,

one surface from another.

So this big mass that you see with this geometry to it,

in plan view, continues down into the floor beneath us

creating these warm walls for two bedrooms downstairs.

[bright, gentle music]

The house is really integrated to the mountaintop site.

Part of it is subterranean, it's down in the earth itself,

and so it's a perfect example of a house

that grows of the hill.

You also feel, at least I feel a little bit,

like I'm looking out the opening of a cave.

So, even though the glass and the windows are high,

he also does this thing of creating a line

that gives you a sense of a lowering of the space.

He's really called attention to it

with giving it a different stain, a contrasting stain.

This is such a cliche,

but it is like being inside a sculpture.

[gentle music]

[Steve] This is the primary bedroom.

[Dave] This wing has a lot of same elements

that the other wing does.

It has its own fireplace,

but also it has the same sort of gap in the ceiling

that leads your eye to the central skylight, or oculus,

and beneath the skylight is another round enclosure

where there's a dressing area, closets, bathroom, et cetera.

The headboard and the built-in night tables

and shelving is something that shows Ken's preference

for woodworkers to be able

to design these very aesthetically pleasing elements.

He talked about a kind of an honesty in use of materials,

and so, here he's showing you exactly how it's constructed

and taking the construction process

and the structure itself, all the elements

and going, This is an element that I want you to see

of how everything is put together.

And wherever you see them,

they create a kind of visual rhythm

that creates another part of the visual experience.

Ken really thought that people should use glass

in a much more free way,

and I think that Ken would use the glass

in a joyful way to create a lively momentum

and visual lines, but it also served

to separate every single structural element that you see,

and you get this fascination

with the free inter-penetration of interior

and exterior space that the glass allows for.

[gentle music]

[Steve] We've got the circular patterns all around,

and most obviously, the mirror

with this killer lighting above it.

When you walk in and you shift around,

it does kind of an optical interesting play

where there's another door

and it's like, is it all cabinets?

Is it a one-way entrance?

No, it's two.

It's kind of neat.

This relates to the bathroom design in the Doolittle House

where John Vugrin did a very elaborate version

of this very same central structure.

It's one of the kind of neat things about Kellogg

is that although he really cherished this idea

of taking every client, every job, every site,

and allowing it to dictate a brand new approach,

he still had a sort of familiar bag of tricks

that he would pull out.

[birds chirping]

These shapes, these buildings that he created,

so distinctive, so wonderful.

If he was taking in the information

of what other architects built,

he took it in at a kind of peripheral level

and he mixed it up

and he created something super unique and wonderful.

That's how I think he was a true artist,

because that stuff seemed to have come intuitively.

[gentle music]