Exploring A Completely Off-the-Grid California Modern Home near Mount Whitney | House Tour

Lone Pine is situated in Inyo County, which has the distinction of having the highest peak, which is Mount Whitney, and the lowest point, which is Death Valley. So that is a huge county of which Lone Pine is a city of about 2,000. It's about seven miles from where our house is situated. So even though this feels quite remote, we have easy access to the town. I'm Karen Rathburn. And I'm Gary Rathburn, and we're in Lone Pine, California at the Lone Pine It House. My father gave me the land when I was 30. He had acquired it from Dr. Merrill Wolfe. He was a spiritualist and a philosopher, and he had an organization that built the Tuttle Creek Ashram in the 30s. So this property was part of that homestead, and his second wife had been caretakers here. When his wife was ill, they returned after a number of years. They sold my father the bottom five acres of the property that was the homestead. And he built across the street, took him years, but he built his own cabin. When I was 30, he gave me the land, and I've had it since then, waiting to build a house here until I met my wonderful husband. After Karen's father lost his wife in 2012, I believe, we started coming up here more frequently and over time decided that we would build here. His dream was to have Karen build on the land because he loved the Owens Valley and Lone Pine, so he wanted her to have that experience. I mean, I've been building houses my whole life, so I really didn't want to physically build another one. So we looked at modulars and prefabs and had a couple of false starts. Didn't really find what we wanted, and we're kind of despondent over the whole thing. We're sitting here one day and said, whatever we do, every time we drive up, I just want to go, man, that's a great house. And so we had had a stack of dwell magazines because every year they do a prefab issue, and Karen was thumbing through an old one, and there was a quarter-page blurb of an it house. I think it was Kathy Opie's it house, and so I started reading about Linda and realized she was in L.A., so she was familiar with the L.A., California codes and things, and then found out that her own it house that she built for herself was in Pioneertown as an Airbnb, so we went and stayed there, and the terrain is almost identical to this. We got in there between snowstorms, got snowed in, just fell in love with it. So we tracked down Linda and started talking about an it house. This spot here between the two rock ridges always felt to me like the place to build a house. I had a few couple girlfriends here, and we built a little campfire, did a little kind of ceremony with the idea of putting out the intention someday I'd build a house here. In this particular spot, I mean, it has the views to the west of the Sierras, and then to the east, the Inyo Mountains, and then the valley floor with the Owens Lake, dry lake sometimes, but now lately it's had water, and it's lovely to see the sunrises reflected in the lake. So it's really amazing that anywhere in the house you have a view of unsurpassed vistas that are all natural and a little different. This particular property is surrounded on three sides by Bureau of Land Management or Forest Service land, and then on the west side a ranch that's in a private trust, so there's no possibility of having other development around, and Inyo County is unusual in that it's the second largest county in California, but less than two percent of the land mass of Inyo County is available for private ownership. Working on custom homes, I did a house in Palm Springs that was very contemporary and modern in the 80s, and so I was exposed to the more modern architecture over time. I'm a perfectionist. It takes a lot of work to make those houses look like they didn't take a lot of work. We didn't know when we moved here, but Neutra had built the Euler House just down in the Alabama Hills, and we found a DVD of the interior, so some of the interior treatments just are kind of that flavor of the natural woods and the blending of the interiors and the exteriors. We knew from the time we got here that if anything was built, it was up above and between the two rows of boulders that were left by the glaciers. Once we had started to work with Linda, she made a site visit, and I had the house staked out pretty much on a north-south axis, and she rotated it about 15 degrees, and it made all the difference in the sighting and the views. This was where Karen had her fire in the beginning, and that fire pit was still there, so all through the course of construction, I protected that fire pit. Like, don't drive any equipment over the fire pit, you know, and it's just right outside the dining room window, so the is pretty much where she envisioned it. The id house itself, so it's a steel platform, and then the frame is aluminum, so the basic elements are concrete, steel, aluminum, and glass, and then the interiors, the flooring, the original id houses were done on slabs, radiant heated slabs, but so the the flooring here is, it's a large format composite flooring, but it looks like cement, so it's a nod to the original id house, trying to get that same look. At the time, the interiors of the id house were fiber cement panels. We had originally played with natural wood with like a light gray wash, but then I looked back at the Levitt house, and we looked at the Euler house, and I really wanted to go with the natural wood, so this is rift white oak, all hand-sanded and finished with four coats of clear sealer. Like, this shelf unit here, that's kind of a nod to the x-bracing and the structural components of the house. The kitchen, it's a laminate, but it's an oak laminate that pretty much mirrors the interior finishes. The countertops, stainless, tying into the structure of the house, and then the black granite is the granite. The granites out is what's here. We're in the middle of a giant field of granite boulders. Our granite island is 16 feet long. It's really amazing in certain times of the day, you can see the reflection of the mountains inside the granite. In fact, this house, it feels like a house like you would call a reflection house, because it entices you to reflect, because it's so quiet and peaceful, but it also, no matter where you are, there's other views that are reflecting in the glass, or we put behind the stovetop, where we have the stainless, we used blue glass. That again reflects the mountains. My father called it the jewel in the desert, because it's just so beautiful, all the views from each room. We can sit on the couch facing the mountains, but we can see on the other end of the house, the sunrise from the reflection in the window, so it's really a beautiful experience just to be in it. Hi, I'm Linda Tallman. I'm the architect of the Itt House and Tallman Architecture, and I designed the Lone Pine Itt House. We're doing something that has been done before, so even the case study houses and mid-century houses, they used post and beam structures, going back even to like craftsmen buildings, those used post and beam, and the difference here is we're using aluminum and steel, and so we're using these very high fire severity zone safe materials, and also just resilient materials, more precise materials, straighter materials, and that allows us to do some things that those houses couldn't do, so like the ceiling, the way we have this clear span of space is really due to this steel that is folded and can do that, so there's a very like reductive amount of structure in the same way that the mid-century buildings would do with wood, but now we're doing it with like a higher precision material that allows us to, you know, really integrate other things, and Gary's really kind of done that in his way that he's integrated shades and doorstops and other things, so it's kind of nice to see that like second level of taking advantage of the system that is here, like when you see the warm materials of all the furniture, it kind of ties into the landscape, but then the building is really like reflecting the colors of the landscape, reflecting the colors in the sky, reflecting the change in like what is happening in the mood outside, so all that reflectivity of light and shadow is always changing what the house feels like. The language of how things come together is very much inspired by, for me, really looking at those case study architects from the mid-century, mid-20th century, and I actually looked so closely because I lived in a Craig Elwood house for 10 years in Los Angeles, and it had a big impact on me, just the way of living and thinking about, you know, the simplicity of the spaces and the simplicity of the materials, but still having this amazing relationship to the landscape and the site, even though in Hollywood where I was living, I didn't have a landscape, the ways in which you control the landscape, control the views and divide space to optimize like small spaces and really take the most advantage of them. I'm just so happy that I got to come back to see the house after it's completed. Oftentimes we are done with the project and then someone moves in and it's their private home and we don't get to come back, and it's nice to come back and share this experience with also the client, with Gary and Karen, and see it one more time. It's such an incredible landscape and it was such a special project to work on that, you know, it's nice to spend time here. It's nice to dwell in the house a little bit and see how the light moves across the landscape and see how light is coming into the space, and I got a chance to walk all the way up to the ashram today and sit there and think about what it means to be here, and it's actually the same ideals that I think they had for that cabin that you have to, you know, hike up into the mountain to be at, is also here. That same magic is in this spot. The process of putting the id house together itself was pretty fast. I had the concrete footings put in, but I put the together myself with one person, another man and I put the posts and beams up, and I did have a small crew of carpenter no-labor help with the exterior envelope, and then Linda had a glass installer to do the big glazing for me, but after that I finished the rest of it, so I did all the plumbing, all the mechanical, all the electrical. I built Karen a full-scale cardboard kitchen mock-up so that she could see what her kitchen was going to feel like, and I put a little refrigerator and a cook stove in it. We would come here and camp out during the construction. All the interior finishes, the flooring, the paneling. Linda got us a weatherproof envelope, and then I did the rest of it. Ray and I, Karen's dad, first did all the fencing, drove all the posts and strung the barbed wire together before there was anything here, and then Karen and Ray and I cleared the brush to create the initial space here, just by hand, the three of us out here. We had a travel trailer here for a while. We put the well in first and had a little travel trailer, and we come here and camp. Gradually, you know, there were quite a few rocks here, but every time you go to dig or build something, there's another rock. There's always a rock there, so every one of these rocks was placed either by hand, by myself, or I rented an excavator to place them, so I have a really close relationship with all these rocks. It was about four years. The well went in in 2016. Then we met Linda and went into plan check. There was the house and the garage shop was a separate permit, but I had to get the house permit first before they would let me build the garage. We got the house through permitting, and then the garage came as a package. It was a contractor who did the grading, put in the slab, and put up the garage, so that then became our warehouse for the construction. When we moved up from San Pedro, all of our furniture went in there, but we basically broke ground around early 2018. We moved here full-time in April of 2018, but I'd been traveling back and forth for like the previous several years, but full-time here from April of 2018, and I got final inspection on the house in March of 2022. Almost three miles to the closest source of power, so it's not feasible at all to run power up here. We have a solar array. We have 20 solar panels out back. We have a bank of lithium batteries. We have enough power to do everything we want. We have laundry. We have induction stove. We have forced air heating and cooling. You just can't do it all at the same time. You have to pay attention how much power you have stored, how much you're using. You have to be mindful. We also have a propane-powered 14 kilowatt generator, so worst comes to worst, the generator comes on and we're okay. It's magical. I mean, it's like you're living out in nature, and no matter what's happening, you're cozy inside, and you can see all the wildlife. Watching the change all the time, the colors in the desert, the sunsets and sunrises are so beautiful, so it's really a perfect experience of being in nature, but protected from it, and fun to cook in this kitchen because you're looking up at the mountains. Entertaining here is great because we have sliding doors on both ends of the house, so you can move along the big deck and back into the house and kitchen. It's big enough for us. We can really be using different rooms, but then it's small enough to be cozy. It's really lovely. It's just awe-inspiring every day. I wired the house for a TV. We thought we would be in the guest room in the back watching TV, and we never hung a TV. We read. We look outside. I mean, every day there's something where you just have to stop and go, oh my god, look at that. Sometimes the rays of sun coming between the clouds look like biblical almost, or it's just amazing. What makes it the most special is the land my dad gave me. I've been coming here visiting since I was a child, and that was a dream of mine before I met Gary, and the fact that, you know, he's so loving and dedicated that he really made my dream and my father's dream come true of living here. My father was just completely overwhelmed with the beauty, and he'd never seen a house like this. You know, he eventually got dementia, and he didn't remember a lot, but before that happened, he got to come here and really even help and know what we were doing, so that made it very, very special. The fact that Gary, you know, works so tirelessly to make those dreams come true really is the most moving thing about living here. Gary'd do pretty much all by himself. I worked the first couple years in Bishop, and then my father got dementia, and I became a full-time caregiver while he was building the house. I mean, I was involved in helping pick fixtures. Occasionally, I could come up and help him with the physical work of pulling wires or picking, you know, the flooring and handing it to him, but because my dad wasn't able to be on his own, I was busy with that while he by himself was finishing our home, and that was really a lonely, hard endeavor, but here we are. He did it, and not many people could have done it with the vision. I mean, the deck was really his design, and it's just a real privilege to live in a house made from love on property that was given to me in love.