Commune Design Helps a Young Creative Couple Manifest Their Dream of Coastal Bliss

Each of the two conjoined units has its own dining room, living area, kitchen, and sleeping quarters. Here, Hans Wegner chairs surround an Eero Saarinen table beneath a paper-and-bamboo lantern by Kojima Shoten. Artwork by Sharon Matas.

Art: Sharon Matas

The Matases had been visiting The Sea Ranch—a quietly radical planned community that sprang up in the 1960s along 10 miles of breathtaking Northern California coastline—for roughly a decade when the opportunity arose to acquire their own slice of heaven. During the COVID pandemic, they purchased two adjacent units in Condominium 1, the first development erected on the property, which was designed by Moore along with fellow architects Donlyn Lyndon, William Turnbull Jr., and Richard Whitaker. In keeping with their do-no-harm edict, the couple decided to preserve the two units as discrete entities, each with its own living room, dining area, kitchen, and sleeping quarters. There is only one point of connection, a camouflaged sliding door that joins the lower level of the first home to the upper level of the second, a condition facilitated by the angle of the hillside site.

“We like that it’s a little uncomfortable navigating the units. It’s almost as if you’re going camping,” states Mike Matas, an entrepreneur and designer at LoveFrom, Jony Ive’s creative collective. “The experience isn’t about luxury. Nothing is overly polished. You have to work your way through the spaces, which is part of the fun,” adds his wife, Sharon, a designer and illustrator, hailing the puzzle-like quality of the architecture.

In the second living room, a wall light by J.J.M. Hoogervorst hangs above a custom cocktail table and daybed.

Mike and Sharon Matas rest outside the girls’ bunk room.

Although one of the units remained largely intact when the Matases found it, the second had fallen victim to an ill-conceived 1990s renovation that included such unseemly details as glass railings. “If you try to modernize these spaces, you basically destroy them. The only way to live here in a sensible way is to embrace the original ideas,” Alonso insists. To ensure their remedial efforts remained true to the Sea Ranch ethos, Commune collaborated with Eric Haesloop of Turnbull Griffin Haesloop Architects, the successor firm to William Turnbull Associates. “In some ways this was an academic project. Commune is serious about history and research, and they were open to wherever it led,” Mike recalls.