No Place Like Home

An art-collecting couple builds a mysterious dream house of sinuous lines and dramatic views in Southern California.

- lan Volner

This isn't the only Hill House out there," says architect Robin Donaldson. He's right: Historic homes with that title dot the map from Scotland to Arizona; novelist Shirley Jackson famously borrowed the name for her 1959 Gothic classic, The Haunting of Hill House. Like its spooky fictional counterpart, the 10,720-square-foot concrete structure that Southern California-based Donaldson + Partners created for art collectors Bruce Heavin and Lynda Weinman in Montecito, California, is big, a little odd, and full of curious secrets that slowly reveal themselves over time.

Fortunately, this Hill House is a lot cheerier than Jackson's.

"People are always surprised by how comfortable it is," Weinman says. After selling their online education business eight years ago, the couple decided it was time for a major lifestyle upgrade. Donaldson, a close friend and collaborator who had designed the couple's former office, was the natural choice and spent two years working up a scheme only for his clients to change course: Ditching the initial site, they acquired another closer to the sea, straddling a slender ridge. There, Heavin says he wanted to build a house that would "explore the emotional and the irrational." With that as a mandate, Donaldson and his collaborators went all in on a design that pushes toward the sublime with structural invention and a deft feel for the landscape.