California Coastal showcases the breadth and beauty of home design with the sea as a backdrop.
The new book showcases gorgeous architecture and design along the California coast.
Anyone who spends a day or even a few minutes on the California coast will realize that the light here is different. Diffused by the sea and scrubbed by the air, it becomes a living companion—day and night.
Heather Herbert (@heathersandyherbert) and Chase Reynolds Ewald (@chaserenoldsewald) get it. The authors of the forthcoming book California Coastal: Seaside Living from Sea Ranch to San Diego (2025, Gibbs Smith) reveal the beauty of California’s shoreline through the stories and images of 18 stunning homes. The book offers an intimate look at how architecture and landscape merge along the coast, from rugged northern retreats to sleek Southern California bungalows.
We sat down with the authors to discuss the book’s inspiration, the evolution of coastal design, and what makes California’s seaside living so unique.
Authors Heather Herbert and Chase Reynolds Ewald
What inspired you to create this book?
Chase Reynolds Ewald: We live in the San Francisco Bay Area, with only the coastal mountain range between our homes and the coast. The California coast’s history, beauty and bounty are intrinsic to every aspect of our lives, and our book is a love letter to our state and our shore. Heather Herbert: We were mindful of our coast’s beauty and vulnerability. While coastal development is inevitable, at its best, it should not only respect but embrace the health and well-being of the coastline. The homes we selected vary in scale and architectural language. We always tried to choose homes that were mindful, intentional responses to their sites’ opportunities and challenges.
The Santa Barbara coast is part of the new book.
What common themes did you notice in how these homes were designed to withstand the elements?
CRE: Coastal California is a living landscape, and the fundamental impacts of topography and weather are heightened wherever the land meets the sea. Continually formed and reformed as land, sea and weather patterns converge, the shoreline is vulnerable to nature’s forces and the human hand.
HH: The designers and owners of the homes in California Coastal share a great respect for the land. While building to maximize views and the site’s advantages, they’re also attuned to sun, wind, water and coastline influences. Homes are often built on hillsides, both for protection from the elements and to lessen the impact of the architecture on the neighborhood. Many are designed around sheltered courtyards for privacy and ease of living. Resilient materials, mainly stone and certain types of wood, are a part of every design solution.
Finally, landscaping that is minimal, hardy and resistant to the often harsh coastal conditions helps each project blend into its coastal setting—and helps ensure those lovely coastal gardens survive!
Big Sur serves as a backdrop for this stunning home featured in the new book, California Coastal.
What defines California coastal design?
CRE: From structures set seamlessly into the landscape of the northern and central coast to those woven into the south’s more urban context, we chose to feature homes governed by a respect for the environment, an appropriate sense of scale and an abiding passion for the coast.
HH: The homes we chose protect from the elements, an immersive experience of the coastal environment, a casual indoor-outdoor lifestyle and a palpable sense of place. The blend of resilience and refuge, embracing the environment and retreating from it, is probably one of the most significant shared elements of the homes we profiled. Above all, the shared passion for the coast stood out, defining how these homeowners wanted to live.
How did photography help tell the story of these homes?
CRE: We’ve been lucky to feature work by many of the most talented architectural photographers working along the coast and some beyond the state. It’s almost impossible to capture in words what a photograph can capture in an image, especially in the case of stunning architecture in dramatic landscapes, whether it’s a home perched above rocky cliffs at Sea Ranch, a contemporary beach house with one of SoCal’s quintessential lifeguard towers in the foreground or a shot taken from a second-story office showing a surfer catching a wave on a break just below the home.
We’re grateful to Adam Potts (@adampottsphoto) for allowing us to use his iconic coastal landscapes, which capture the essence of the northern, central and southern coastlines.
Santa Cruz shines brilliantly.
How did the architecture and design shift as you moved from the rugged Sonoma Coast to sun-drenched Southern California?
HH: We divided the book into three distinct regions. The far north of the state, the least-developed region, has old-growth forests and mountains, mighty rivers and large bays. The craggy coastline of Mendocino and Sonoma counties north of San Francisco is an interplay of bluffs, fertile tidepools, coastal meadows and oak woodlands.
The Central Coast, characterized by its iconic cliffs and jagged edges, is perhaps best known for Big Sur, where the mountains plunge thousands of feet into the sea. While it is also home to sandy bluffs and volcanic rock formations, the state’s southern coast’s identity is most often defined by its broad, highly developed beaches, as 60% of its population lives there.
More than a general shift from north to south, each home along the coast responded to its unique context. Contemporary architecture exists alongside more traditional forms in each region.
A home sits among the dunes on Stinson Beach.
What do you hope readers take away from the book?
CRE: We hope the book renews appreciation for the West Coast’s leadership in thinking about indoor-outdoor living and inspires readers to foster a connection to place, no matter where they live. These homes were shaped by homeowners, architects, the environment and the guidelines thoughtfully put in place nearly 50 years ago to help protect the California coastline.
HH: We protect the things we love—our hope is that our love for the coast inspires our readers to embrace and protect it as well.
