HOUSE IN BIG SUR

ADMIRERS call it the most beautiful -- house on the most beautiful site in the U.S. Any architect would envy the site and some might have suggestions for doing things differently (they usually do), but all would agree that Architect Nathaniel Owings has built himself a house that any man could be proud of.

Site and architect came together by sheer chance. Seven years ago, rotund, ebullient Nat Owings, 56, a senior partner of the huge architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, was visiting San, Francisco for the express purpose of courting a handsome divorcee, Margaret Wentworth. One fine fall day they set out on a picnic in the precipitous Big Sur country south of Carmel. Scrambling along the cliffs, they came upon a finger of land that thrust out into the Pacific in lonely grandeur. To the south, they could see a 40-mile sweep of coastline. Six hundred feet below, sea lions barked on a small white sand beach. As they sat on a massive rock lunching on peaches and champagne, they decided that when they were married this would be the place for their home.

After their marriage a year later, Owings bought the 55-acre site. Says Owings: "It was six hundred feet long, six hundred feet high and six feet wide," and the statement was only a slight exaggeration. What gave special relish to the job for Nat Owings was that in 32 years of designing, including work on such large-scale projects as Oak Ridge, Tenn., Moroccan airbases, and Crown Zellerbach's new building in San Francisco (TIME, Sept. 7), he had never built a house.

Indian-Mound Garage. Big Sur is challenging country. The land is periodically shaken by earthquakes, battered by 80-m.p.h. winds; rainfall can total 72 in. in three months, and termites abound. To cope with these problems, Owings designed a kind of concrete saddle over the ridge, anchored by eight caissons reaching down into bedrock. On this he secured a rigid A-frame, surrounded it with cantilevered balconies carried around the outside to exploit the spectacular view. For roof beams he bought 60-year-old redwood timbers of a demolished bridge. A four-car garage was dug partially out of bedrock, leaving a prehistoric Indian mound undisturbed. Says Owings: "No house can do more than snuggle into and grab hold of and hold on to a sheer bit of granite on this coast."

The Owingses decided to call their new house "Wild Bird" because "we have the feeling of soaring in mid-air--airplanes often pass below the house, and red-tailed hawks are our constant visitors." Through binoculars they have seen mountain climbers tumble to the beach below, once had to call in some professional rock climbers to rescue Nat Owings' 16-year-old daughter Jennifer, who was caught at nightfall halfway up the cliff.

Mosaic Carpets. To contrast with nature's grandeur, the Owingses tried to make the interior snug and warm. The only floor coverings are the pebble floor-mosaics designed by Mrs. Owings, but art abounds in the house--paintings by Morris Graves, drawings by Buffet, a candelabra by Seymour Lipton. When someone remarked that the house, with its redwood sheathing and massive chimney, was reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright, Nat Owings, a longtime aluminum-and-glass specialist, was taken aback, finally admitted: "Wright was a master of the organic philosophy of design. Perhaps anyone who reaches toward nature, or wants to meet nature on its own ground, would be bound to cross his path somewhere."

As far as the Owingses are concerned, their home suits them to a T. Says Owings: "This is a onetime house for the rest of the time we expect to be here on earth."

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