In the early 1960s, Hawaiian conglomerate Castle and Cook was looking to construct a planned community along the Northern California coast. The search for a suitable location was led by Alfred Boeke, vice president of the company’s real estate development subsidiary, Oceanic Properties. While scouting the shoreline via helicopter, Boeke was drawn to a unique coastal stretch whose meadows ran to the sea from thick wooded foothills, segmented by parallel bands of planted cypress. The region was too far removed from any urban center to host a typical suburban development, but Boeke was compelled by the scenic potential, and convinced Oceanic to alter their plans and develop a second home community on the site. 

In 1963, the land formerly known as Rancho del Mar was acquired by Oceanic. Trained as an architect, Boeke approached the development with methodical concern, hiring esteemed landscape architect Lawrence Halprin to assess the site and produce a guiding masterplan, for the responsible integration of new buildings into the unique landscape. At Halprin’s recommendation, Bay Area architects Joseph Esherick and Moore, Lyndon, Turnbull, and Whitaker (MLTW) were hired to design three demonstration projects intended to attract buyers, and guide the stylistic language of future homebuilding. 

Joseph Esherick & Associates designed six detached homes clustered along one of the southern hedgerows, as well as a general store building later expanded to house the multi-use Sea Ranch Lodge. MLTW designed a condominium complex, which remains the only multifamily building along the 10 mile development, despite initial plans favoring mixed density. Shortly after their work on Condominium One, the firm collaborated with Halprin to design an athletic center, which quickly joined the demonstration buildings as a key icon of Sea Ranch in the press. 

Both Joseph Esherick and the members of MLTW, in various iterations of their practice, returned to Sea Ranch for numerous commissions in the decades which followed their initial work. Joined by dozens of architects who have since contributed to the community, they amassed one of the most significant collections of modern Bay Area architecture, and honored the founding visions of Halprin and Boeke in their regional and ecologically oriented designs.

More than 1,600 homes have been constructed at Sea Ranch since the sale of lots first began (Lyndon 13). All such designs were subject to committee review prior to their construction, ensuring basic accordance with the local design vocabulary. The urban and environmental principles of the founding vision, however, were largely abandoned in the 1980s, as Oceanic Properties resorted to typical suburban subdivision in a bid to counter declining finances. 

In 1968, Joseph Esherick’s original general store was enveloped in additions to create the Sea Ranch Lodge, featuring visitor accommodations, a bar, restaurant, lounge, and administrative facilities.

Sea Ranch remains largely a second home community, but hosts a sizable population of full time residents as well.

Of Sea Ranch’s nearly 4,000 acres, 2,300 remain undeveloped and serve as public commons. A further 140 acres at the north end were ceded to Sonoma County to become Gualala Point Regional Park (Lyndon 13, 29). 

The Esherick Hedgerow Houses, Condominium One, Sea Ranch Lodge, and Moonraker Athletic Center have been maintained with excellent care and sensitive concern for their historical character.

The planning and development of Sea Ranch was one of the earliest substantial efforts in the US to combine the emerging cross-disciplinary practice of Ecology with landscape and architectural design (Progressive Architecture, May. 1966). Lawrence Halprin relied on a team of geologists, geographers, hydrologists, foresters and other environmental specialists, not only to assess the condition of the landscape as it was in the early 1960s, but to piece together a theoretical profile of local environmental history, and extrapolate future trends which the Sea Ranch would have to address in its planning and management. His experts determined that the coastal shelf had already been grassland long before colonial logging or herding began, perhaps even predating the arrival of local indigenous groups (Lyndon 19). In its distant past, the clearing was believed to have been kept free from wooded growth by wild grazing, before ranching and domesticated animals took over. Halprin’s team suggested that a sheep population should be maintained on the site to manage the meadow growth, but the proposal was rejected by Oceanic Properties, and the problem addressed instead by a vigilant cooperative groundskeeping program, led by the pseudo-governing Sea Ranch Association. Halprin’s vision of homes clustered along the hedgerows like organic outcroppings required new planting along the original early twentieth century cypress rows. Long since matured, the new growth has served both to bolster the once thinning visual mass of the hedgerows, and provided new strength against the wind in their contribution to the root systems. Beyond physical intervention in the project’s early years, the core precepts and planning of Halprin’s vision were given a commanding legacy in the 111 page 1965 “Declaration of Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions” incorporated into every Sea Ranch deed. The Declaration’s lasting authority, and the enduring vitality of the Sea Ranch Association, have kept Halprin’s approach to ecological sensitivity a formidable force, as tangible in its effect on the land as the climatically shaped architecture of MLTW and Joseph Esherick.

The unprecedented affordability of car ownership following the Second World War allowed for commuter suburbs to flourish across the United States. The promise of space, autonomy, and privacy made the suburban lifestyle a benchmark synonymous with the American dream, but attitudes of skepticism and dissatisfaction were already gaining serious momentum as the country entered the 1960s (Sexton 13). As automotive suburbia came of age, unexpected and often disappointing realities left some Americans questioning whether something vital had been lost along the relentless path towards convenience and individualism.

The self-contained and financially self-supportive nature of the Sea Ranch community allowed its creators to explore idealized visions of humanity’s relationship to society and its environment. Although such laboratory conditions may have distanced their investigation from the complexities and hazards of broader urban crises, the careful exercise of social reflection and natural rediscovery achieved at Sea Ranch was far from a trivial fantasy. The second home community offered tenants, hailing from the city or suburb alike, a chance to find in nature a thoroughly humanized existence, as yet to be perfected in the world with which they were otherwise accustomed. Described by Lyndon and Turnbull as foremost “restorative” in its importance to residents, Sea Ranch’s alternative model of living was never an antidote to the ills or indirection of American planning, but it undoubtedly provided interim relief to those dissatisfied with the status quo (Sexton 42). And while median Sea Ranch home prices now sit routinely above one million dollars, a village of worker’s cabins built in 1985 offers 45 low-income accommodations, available by their subsidized status to any lower income Sonoma county residents, not exclusively Sea Ranch employees (Lyndon 117, Redfin).

The contributions of Joseph Esherick and MLTW to Sea Ranch mark a key chapter in the longstanding Bay Area Tradition, and a significant shift in the national course of American modernism. Although educated in the Beaux-Arts, and trained by East Coast modernist George Howe, Esherick established himself as a pioneering figure within the postwar Bay Tradition, soon after opening his San Francisco practice in 1946 (House and Home, Jan. 1952). His professional approach grappled with new modern realities, while retaining the attentive concern to landscapes and use of rough natural materials characteristic of his more eclectic Bay Area predecessors. Surviving across decades of aesthetic turbulence, the particular shack-like vernacular which influenced his mature work at Sea Ranch had persisted in various forms of Northern California architecture since at least the mid nineteenth century (Scully 15). The appeal of this enduring idiom lay not only in its flexibility -key in achieving site specific and weather attuned forms at Sea Ranch- but in its regional quality. The latter attribute was of special concern to the office of MLTW, who asserted that the, “first purpose of architecture is territorial,” and accordingly, architects are responsible for creating an “image of place” (Donat 31). To see early postmodern tendencies aligned with a simple, flexible, regional vernacular as such, was not uncommon in the US at the time; exemplifying a trend identified by historian Vincent Scully as a renaissance of both aesthetic and cultural attitudes embodied in the late nineteenth century Shingle Style (Scully 3). Evoking modesty, democracy, and “praising an unpretentious kind of life,” both iterations of the Shingle Style represented a, “rediscovery of special American realities and fiercely American traditions” (Scully 3,8). Exclusive to neither and essential to both, Sea Ranch belongs firmly to the lineage of local Bay Area architecture, but undoubtedly exemplified and influenced the spirit, convictions, and design practice of national interest in regional wooden construction, and its connection to the emergence of early postmodern ideas.

Although more moderate than the communes and counterculture of the 1960s Bay Area, Alfred Boeke’s vision for Sea Ranch was a daring progressive gamble, prioritizing the relationship between residents and their natural environment over the greater prospective sales volume offered by a typical parcelized scheme. As the popular environmental romanticism of the 1960s gave way to radical fervor in the 1970s, however, the community was targeted by advocates aligned with the very same concerns which first set the Sea Ranch project in motion. Viewed as, “an example of coastal misuse, a symbol of privilege, locking out the public from access to the shoreline,” Oceanic Properties was challenged by the local Sonoma campaign, Californians Organized to Acquire Access to State Tidelands (COAST), and the statewide advocacy group Coastal Alliance. Many at Sea Ranch were sympathetic to the concerns of these groups, but shifting demographics had brought affluent, and often conservative, tenants to the community in the first decade of its expansion; providing a base of interest which fought vehemently, in court and the state legislature, to oppose public recreational accommodations within the development (Diamonstein 139). Between settlements and legislation, Sea Ranch eventually yielded 140 acres to Sonoma County as dedicated park space, created five public access trails from the highway to the ocean, and instituted new zoning regulations to ensure highway views would remain unobstructed (Lyndon 29, 32). The changes ultimately worked to the benefit of the public, with negligible effect for much of the Sea Ranch population, but as Charles Moore attested in a 1980 interview, the affair proved a disheartening wound to the community’s founding liberal spirit and atmosphere of peace (Diamonstein 139). Now the very trails which caused a flashpoint in the seventies have become the first front in the impact of climate change at Sea Ranch. Public beach access has seen episodes of prolonged closure with rising tides and accelerating erosion, which have also begun to threaten the community’s road and buildings as well (Murphy).

In a country whose suburban landscape has been dominated by calculated subdivision since the end of the Second World War, Sea Ranch represents an exceedingly unique and responsible community project; distinguished from the outset by an exceptional regard for the integrity and value of the natural environment, shared by its developers, landscape professionals, architects, and clients alike. As a testing ground for the still evolving Bay Area Tradition, Sea Ranch helped to shape and sustain one of America’s premier schools of regional modern practice, and served as a case study for the civic guidance of communal aesthetics. Sea Ranch exists as much in a living vision of commitment and community as it does in the static facts of its built environment, in many ways echoing the priorities of sustainable design and community outreach which have since come to define the moral center of contemporary architecture.

Diamondstein, Barbaralee. American Architecture Now. Rizzoli, 1980. 

Donat, John. World Architecture 2. Studio Vista, 1965. 

“Ecological Architecture Planning the Organic Environment.” Progressive Architecture, May. 1966, pp. 120–135.

Murphy, Emma. “Prolonged Closure of Beloved Sonoma County Beach Poses Dilemma for New Climate Era.” Pressdemocrat.Com, Press Democrat, 15 Feb. 2023, www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/prolonged-closure-of-beloved-sonoma-county-beach-poses-dilemma-for-new-clim/?artslide=3. 

“Joseph Esherick and His Use of Form, Space, Site.” House and Home, January. 1952, pp. 24–35.

Lyndon, Donlyn, and James Alinder. The Sea Ranch: Fifty Years of Architecture, Landscape, Place, and Community on the Northern California Coast. Princeton Architectural Press, 2004. 

Redfin. “Sea Ranch Housing Market: House Prices & Trends.” Redfin, www.redfin.com/city/28203/CA/Sea-Ranch/housing-market. Accessed 29 Jan. 2024. 

Scully, Vincent Joseph. The Shingle Style Today: Or the Historian’s Revenge. George Braziller, 1978. 

Sexton, Richard, et al. Parallel Utopias: The Sea Ranch, California: Seaside, Florida: The Quest for Community. Chronicle Books, 1996.