Bow Bay House - East Bay, California
Julia Morgan, 1938
Julia Morgan’s Bow Bay House was commissioned by Elsa Schilling as a result of a chance meeting in a hospital. Elsa was a maiden lady about 50 years old living in San Francisco with her parents, the spice moguls, when in 1938 she fell from her horse and broke her hip. At about the same time, Morgan broke her hip on the job by falling from a ladder. Their meeting resulted in Julia’s agreement to build a lodge for Elsa. The chosen location was a 7.5-acre wooded site including a sandy 400 feet of the California west shore of Lake Tahoe, half a mile north of Bliss State Park, bounded on the west by a mile of woodland, 9,000-foot Rubicon Peak and 20 miles of Desolation Wilderness area. On the north and south it was bordered by intermittent creeks. The main house had 6 bedrooms, the guest house one. Interior decoration motif was Scandinavian. Elsa with her three servants spent summers there plus the weeks of the 1960 Winter Olympics, always requiring formality. When she died her many heirs tried to share the property, but the expenses and negotiations proved so burdensome that they in 1976 sold the property to the second and present owners, progenitors of a large and informal family now numbering 29 (2006). Julia Morgan’s design proved quite adaptable to the drastic change: no servants, lots of residents, summer and winter sports on land and lake, outdoor campfires and barbecues, and an American Indian motif.
Submission:
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