Property of Mr. and Mrs. Clint Thompson, Modesto, California | Architects: Joseph Esherick & Assoc.

10/07/2025 11:02:00 PM

The art of manipulating light has been a concern of countless architects from the builders of Rome's open-dome Pantheon to our own contemporary, Le Corbusier. The room-wide glass wall is only one of the expedients some of them have tried. There are other more subtle means, many of which are demonstrated in Mr. and Mrs. Clint Thompson's house in Modesto, Calif.- a house not flooded but deftly laced with light.

In designing the house, the Thompsons' architect, Joseph Esherick, had to cope with a number of conflicting circumstances: Modesto's weather can be very warm at times in summer and cold in winter. The site a former apricot orchard-is on a corner bounded by two rather well-traveled streets, yet the Thompsons wanted privacy for outdoor as well as indoor living. They also wanted easy indoor-outdoor circulation for informal summer parties as well as a separate and closeable dining room for more formal entertaining in winter.

Some of the means architect Esherick adopted to reconcile these conflicts also contribute to the beneficent quality of the light. Only one room has a room-wide wall of glass-the garden room, below-but it serves, as a garden room should, to bring added light and airiness to all the rooms around it. And almost every room has at least one pair of sliding glass doors, all of them 10 feet high. These are complemented by less common light control devices: A colonnaded loggia creates transitions of semi-shade in summer between the air-cooled indoors and the sweltering outdoors, yet it does not impede the lower sun in winter. And the house has nineteen skylights, many placed directly over or close to doorways and raised above the roof, so that they create curtains of light between the rooms. Thus when daylight begins to fade and the side windows darken, there is still light from overhead, a mysterious light whose source you cannot see.