Hillsborough, California, a home designed by Robert Marquis & Claude Stoller

9/17/2025 12:28:00 AM

This is the home of a young family-not exactly typical, but expressive of the values exhibited today by increasing numbers of their contemporaries. The husband, in his early thirties, is a hustling, humorous, enthusiastic young executive who has made an impressive success of running an inherited family business. He has to travel a good deal, and his calm, attractive young wife likes to go with him. Both are intimately involved in the affairs of their two children a slender, gentle, imaginative girl of 9 and a remarkably talkative young man of 2-but children by no means dominate the household (no trace of the Bohemian permissiveness so prevalent among young families a decade or so ago). This young couple takes part in community affairs and enjoys their neighbors (who are as near and numerous as in any suburb where lots average somewhat less than an acre), but they also value highly what so many of today's suburbs are purported to lack-family privacy. This alone accounts for a great deal about the design of their wood-framed stucco house (as well as for the fact that they shall hereinafter be referred to as He and She).

The rest they left up to the architect who designed for their individual style of living an individual house with a certain quality of romance and 2.700 square feet of space including five bedrooms (one of them only roughed in). The house is as unpretentious as a Windsor chair. But in the quality of its materials and superbly executed detail, it is as polished as the manners of the young people who live in it.

Once in the living room you understand immediately the reason for the parasol section of the roof, for through the clerestory windows that fill in its four gables you get a brief but satisfying view of the trees around the house and another stand of tall pines across the street. In addition to uplifting the eyes and the spirit, the uplifted room also provides additional light to balance the light from the window wall along the side of the room that faces the terrace, lawn and swimming pool at the back of the house.

As you sit in the living room, your view of the pool is interrupted by two large grass-covered mounds created for just that purpose (as He explains it, "so we won't feel we're living in a beach club"). But for active, imaginative children, these mounds serve a hundred and one more exciting purposes. The house too, both in plan and detail, lends itself readily to flexible use by people with ideas of their own-and everyone in this young family has them. It did not take the 2-year-old long to discover a wonderful non-stop route for his tricycle: down the bedroom hall to the entrance hall and back through the kitchen and family room.. The oak parquet floors in the halls and family room remain quietly impervious to this traffic.

The entrance courtyard, below, designed solely as an in- viting approach to the house, is periodically transformed into a theater where the 9-year-old and her friends put on plays for an adult audience of two or three sitting on the steps just in- side the iron gate. The wall at the right of the court also makes a wonderful background for special decorations at Halloween or Christmas time.

Originally, the family room, right, was intended to function primarily as a playroom. But as He explains, it is now an "everything room." He credits Her with discovering how well it doubles as an auxiliary dining room when they give large parties. (With the help of bridge tables and a caterer they have served as many as forty seated guests, some in the family room, some in the dining area on the other side of the kitchen, some on the terrace.) The family room has also been used for dancing, to the music of a trio stationed in the hall.

It took the family cocker, however, to discover that the family room has a built-in dog house: the wood storage cupboard next to the fireplace, under the TV set. On warm days he comes in from the terrace through the swinging door in the outside wall (designed for easy loading of cupboard with logs) and naps contentedly in the cool darkness of the wood bin.