This California Home Will Make You Forget Everything You Know About Traditional Beach Design
In the late 1960s, when San Francisco lawyer Frank “Sandy” Tatum and his wife, Barbara, set out to build a family beach home, their vision, for a house that could sleep 12, was large. Their slice of beach on Monterey Bay wasn’t.
Undeterred, the Tatums hired William Turnbull Jr. to design a roughly 1,600-square-foot house on Potbelly Beach in Aptos, Calif., approximately 80 miles south of San Francisco. To maximize the living space, Mr. Turnbull, then just starting what would become a notable architectural career, devised a modern, three-story home anchored by what he called a “sleeping machine,” a white, rectangular structure that housed the bedrooms and bathrooms, said Shelley Tatum Kieran, 60, the youngest of the Tatums’ six children. Two staircases and an open-plan living room with floor-to-ceiling windows flank that core sleeping block.
