This house was designed for a painter and professor of art history and his wife, who is a special education instructor. The couple had recently relocated to the central coast of California from a small town in rural Minnesota, where they had previously lived in a relatively nondescript two-level house comprised of an assortment of discrete rooms. Within this old house the couple moved from room to room throughout the day in pursuit of their various activities: painting, writing, cooking, eating, sleeping, etc.—with each activity devoted to a specific space. This meant, however, that 90% of the spaces in their house remained unoccupied and unused when the activities that they supported were not being pursued. In addition, the discreteness of these little rooms automatically made each of their activities private ones—despite the fact that most of the time they preferred to be in the same space at the same time, regardless of what they were doing.

In contrast, they wanted their new house to allow them to orchestrate their own activity spaces. The design of the Wormhole House enables this by decoupling activities from specific spaces.

Instead, programmatic elements are located within rolling activity cabinets, and these cabinets can be creatively combined with each other within a large open area, or else with a series of unprogrammed three-sided alcoves along one side of the house—each with its own distinct material and color palette. When a particular activity cabinet is positioned along the open fourth side then any of these small alcove spaces can be converted to a private “room” devoted to a particular activity—yet the relationship of these spaces to these activities remains flexible.

In addition, above the large open area there exists a thick roof-poché tunneled through with colorful twisting volumes: a flower garden, a Zen garden, a private balcony, and various other undefined spaces with views of the sky above. These “wormholes” can be accessed by positioning particular activity cabinets beneath them and then climbing to the top of the cabinets by means of an internal ladder. When this is done then the top surfaces of the activity cabinets provide the floors to these new, private spaces—spaces which offer a temporary retreat from the everyday reality of the house.