Art Gray Photography

A university town with a hippie vibe, Santa Cruz, California, has long been artist-friendly. But it has also faced a need for affordable live-work accommodations for creatives who have been displaced by luxury residences and increased student enrollment. To reinvigorate the arts scene, the city’s economic development agency embarked on a heroic adaptive-reuse endeavor, purchasing an 1861 tannery complex, partnering with the arts-focused real-estate developer Artspace, and bringing in Mark Cavagnero Associates, an architecture firm that’s built a portfolio weighty with projects in the arts sector. Here, Mark Cavagnero was charged with converting two of the five buildings on the 8-acre riverfront site into the Tannery Arts Center.

Known first as the A.K. Salz Company and later as Salz Leathers, the tannery was operational until 2001, and it naturally saw decades’ worth of architectural modifications and accretions. Some were viable buildings; others were mere shacks and storage sheds. “We got the job because we advocated an aggressive surgical approach,” Cavagnero begins. Preserve what’s needed, sure. But he says he had no qualms about “tearing away some of the more dicey additions to get back to the original material.” Luckily he had plenty of documentation—including, amazingly, a series of black-and-white photographs by Ansel Adams, who was fast friends with the tannery’s owner. Adams shot the buildings and the leather-making process in 1955. “He was a local,” Cavagnero recounts. Delving deeper, he found additional resources: old property-tax plans and some photos from 1908.

He faced a formidable task even so, given that the two buildings, encompassing 28,000 square feet, were derelict. Working from the outside in, he rebuilt facades, the majority of them unsalvageable, with almost precisely the same board-and-batten and clapboard siding and barn-red paint. Replacement doors and windows, with aluminum frames, generally adhere to existing placements. Where he introduced new sliding doors, he framed them in steel. Also new is an external steel staircase linking the upper level of one of the buildings to the ground.

It’s no secret that architecture is a profession of delayed gratification for both practitioner and client. In this case, however, delayed gratification was still in the equation, but architect and client were one and the same. David Martin, third-generation principal of AC Martin Partners, waited nearly a decade to complete his lap pool and pool house. That was after he spent six years designing and building the main house, which he completed in 2001. The 5,000-square-foot residence sits in a piazza like setting on 2.5 wooded acres in Rustic Canyon, a beach-adjacent enclave of Los Angeles. But the pool and the little house, which doubles as a design studio, were included in the overall scheme from day one.

“If you want a piazza, you need a village around it,” Martin starts off. References to the European archetype come easily to him, since he spent four months abroad surveying community spaces when he was a recent graduate on a traveling fellowship from Columbia University. Martin also acknowledges a link to Peter Zumthor’s Hotel Therme Vals in the Swiss Alps, having made the pilgrimage several times. “The lesson there was all about the glamour of swimming and the shower,” he recalls.

But the real genesis came from his wife. A swimmer, Mary Klaus Martin had been on the Olympic track when she was young. She ultimately became an All American triathlete, completing more than 20 national and international events. “The 25-yard pool was a serious requirement,” her husband notes.