Midcentury dreamin': Inside an architect's knockout home in San Diego

Every week, our House Calls feature takes you into homes with great style, big personality, and ineffable soul. Today, we look at house perched on a hill overlooking San Diego. When it was built in 1946, it had no design pedigree, yet award-winning architect John Ike of Ike Kligerman Barkley was drawn to it by what he describes as an emotional pull.

John Ike was born and bred in New York City and raised in Cincinnati, but the West Coast bug bit him in college. "I went to school in Prescott, Arizona. Back then, it was kind of an experimental place, and by the second semester I’d arranged my course schedule so I had classes just one day a week," he says. "I spent the other six days exploring the West."

Years later, when his noted New York-based firm opened a West Coast office in San Francisco, it reignited his California dreaming. "San Francisco is an incredible town, but I’m more of a Southern California guy," he says. "When I was working for [Robert A.M. Stern], we had worked on a project in La Jolla, so I was familiar with the area. I started looking around San Diego."

He turned his sights to Point Loma, a San Diego neighborhood located on a peninsula that juts into the Pacific Ocean. Three years ago, he spotted a home with a modern look and a design and layout he calls "weird, but in a nice way."

The house was created by a naval lieutenant commander just after World War II on the east side of the peninsula. "This area of town has a strong military presence," Ike says. "As we started renovating, we found a lot of materials stamped ‘property of the U.S. Navy.’ My guess is that they were sitting around after the war, and the lieutenant used ‘borrowed’ materials and conscripted laborers to build the house."

Ike has long admired the California modernists, such as Rudolph Schindler and William Wurster, who defined the look and feel of midcentury architecture. This house falls decidedly in the category of "in the style of," and despite his reverence for the earlier architects, Ike appreciates that. "This kind of house is the other side of the modernist coin. I like it, as I wouldn’t enjoy living in a temple."

Darren Bradley

Although the military official who built it wasn’t a trained architect, he did get many things right. For instance, the way the home is sited, which makes the most of stunning city and harbor views. The location also means that when the afternoon breezes kick up they blow over the hill from the ocean and refreshingly through the house.

That said, the design makes the dwelling seem almost like two separate houses. Turn left from the dark entry and you’ll find a bedroom wing. Turn right and you enter the public areas; the kitchen, dining room, and a long, narrow living room that Ike suspects started life as a porch, but was enclosed over the years. A little, almost hidden, stair leads to more lower-level bedrooms and a sitting area.

Although Ike knew he could tweak the floor plan to his benefit, it was the front door that sold him on the hillside dwelling. "These kinds of decisions are emotional," he says. "For me, the handmade Dutch door with circular windows was an evocative statement. I had an strong emotional response to it."

The views and the climate were begging for decks—a design feature the original owner didn’t think of or didn’t get around to—so Ike doubled down on the concept. "I put in two large decks on the back, stacked on top of each other. It seemed like the natural thing to do," he says. "When you are here, you just want to be outside. The decks dramatically increase the living space."

To embrace the new outdoor living areas, Ike bumped up and leveled the sloped roof on the living room. The beams that hold up the roof extend over the deck, terminating in down lights. "Since it really is living space, it’s nice to have some light out there," Ike says.

The roof overhang and the newly leveled ceiling share a common blue color, Dix Blue by Farrow & Ball. "The wood is Douglas Fir, and I painted it so you wouldn’t have it oxidizing and it would look the same indoors and out. The color gives it a consistency," Ike says.

Color also gives the exterior a personal signature. The front exterior is another Farrow & Ball color called Chappell Green. The hefty steel columns that support the deck in back are coated with International Orange by Sherwin Williams, which is the famous rusty hue of the Golden Gate Bridge, roughly 500 miles to the north.

"For the house color, I was inspired by a William Wurster house in Carmel, which is painted a similar green," Ike says. "For the columns, a battleship gray shade would have been the popular choice, but I love the color of the the Golden Gate Bridge, and I think it really pops on them. The bridge is pretty is far away from this house, but the color says California to me."

In fact, the whole project deals in the lexicon of the Golden State. It was there from day one, but Ike enhanced it with architectural moves like flattening the roof in back; replacing and relocating windows to improve views and the look of the exterior; and shingling the house with redwood clapboards. "These are all the elements from the California architects I’ve admired," he says.

The midcentury language is on full display in the newly remodeled kitchen, which Ike agrees could be likened to the efficiency cooking spaces found in Joseph Eichler’s famous modern homes. Like its Eichler cousins, it has vertical-grain, flush-door cabinetry complete with plexiglas sliding panels fronting the upper cabinets. The vintage look comes with an actual midcentury cooktop and oven with a vault-like metal door (it was made by the Chambers Corporation, and Ike says that, back in the day, it was state-of-the-art). The big difference between this space and its midcentury forebears is size. Although it’s not an overly large space, compared to the kitchens that influenced it, this one is on steroids.

Like any good home from the Mad Men era, this one comes with a bar. Ike created a masterpiece watering hole at the end of the long living room based on the work of Swedish midcentury designer Otto Schultz. It features an off-white vinyl front with a decorative pewter nailhead design depicting and Adam-and-Eve-like tropical scene complete with animals. It’s topped by a bronze mirror that warmly reflects the views and makes the room look larger. "There’s no doubt that this is a great party house and it’s a lot of fun to entertain here," says Ike. "It has a good vibe."

For the architect, those vibes permeate the whole project. "It feels so good to get off the plane in San Diego and know I’m seven minutes from this house," Ike says. Although he spends most of his time in New Jersey, this place is special to him and his family. He says: "It’s so evocative of the great Southern California midcentury tradition, and that’s what I’m all about."