Gorda, Calif. – Once upon a time, a young couple purchased a hillside parcel on the southern Big Sur coast and dreamed of retiring there someday, turning an abandoned lumberyard into a family-run bed-and-breakfast.
For design inspiration, the couple recruited Cal Poly San Luis Obispo environmental architecture students, who used the B&B as a class project. Their recommendation:
The inn should intrude as little as possible on the land. Its buildings, the students said, should be circular, in harmony with offshore winds and in keeping with the round tree trunks that peppered the grassy slopes. Nature, they said, should reign.
