Project Description

This 390-square-foot studio addition to the owner/architect’s existing Sonoma home takes inspiration from the site’s abundant pairs of Mourning Doves. A traditional country dovecote houses pigeons or doves, sometimes freestanding but often built into the ends of houses or barns. The architect researched the most advantageous height, orientation, proportion, and ventilation to encourage nesting doves, a process that informed both the shape of the exterior and interior space. Here, although hidden from the interior, twelve nesting boxes are built into the angled exterior facade, encouraging the bird’s co-habitation of the space as in more traditional dovecote structures. A lower bird-watching window focuses on the doves as they ground-feed and serves as a convenient viewing spot for the owner’s two Spinone Italiano Italian bird-dogs. A custom silk sheer panel divides the new space from the old with an image of a murmuration of swallows flocking. This highly personal and customized project by the architect/owner became a site for exploration and play.

The architects followed every intuition about details that might contribute to the space, hoping to stay just this side of too much. What unites the disparate details of this addition is a sense of movement, craft, and nature. The pandemic, the passing of loved ones, and the realization that this second home would become a forever home, all inspired the chapel-like atmosphere and details and the comfort of hearing coos of Mourning Doves just outside with their soft, drawn-out calls sounding like laments. The only logical choice for the roof of the dovecote was a traditional standing seam metal roof cost-effective, fire-resistant, and innocuous. But thanks to Brian Cutright of Cutright Construction and his push to keep exploring more creative solutions, the architects developed the feather’s roof for the dovecote out of the exact same materials at half the cost. The architects shingled the roof in custom laser-cut metal shingles inspired by bird feathers. To maximize the use of the sheet material, the architects developed a feather shape that could nest together on the sheet with minimal waste at the laser cutters. A local foundry took the 3D-printed plastic forms and created a mold to cast them in bronze.

The architects then bound them in leather strapping, using a traditional Manchurian sword-hilt wrapping technique (and far too many hours of YouTube videos). The traditional Japanese aesthetic of Wabi-sabi acknowledges the beauty of imperfection. This small bridge across the entry courtyard to the dovecote explores this idea with a small stone of personal significance wedged between the laminated cedar slats which were upcycled offcuts from the siding material. This minor disturbance then has a far greater ripple effect, bulging it at its center. The stone appears to both be held by the slats and hold them apart, creating a somewhat mysterious glimpse into the ground below.

A flock of starlings in flight is known as a murmuration named for the sound the bird’s wings make en masse. The photographer and artist Richard Barnes kindly supplied an image from his Murmur series of images of these flocks, for which the architects made the Murmuration drape. The architects divided the image into five unique panels and printed them on sheer silk. They then reassembled the images, thus creating a fluttering threshold to, and backdrop for, the dovecote.