A Shipwreck House for $2.85M? You can find this architectural marvel near Folsom Lake
It’s like no other house in the Sacramento region.
The Shipwreck House, which is for sale for $2.85 million, is an architectural marvel of nautical and serpentine imagery that offers stunning views of Folsom Lake and the mountains.
“It’s one of a kind,” said listing agent Cliff Keith of Sotheby’s International Realty. “You won’t find one like it anywhere else.”
“You’ve never seen anything like the Shipwreck House,” realtor.com wrote in an article.
At its most basic, the sustainable home, located at 3599 Hector Road in Newcastle features three bedrooms and four bathrooms stretching over 4,466 square feet of living space. The home sits on one acre and includes a guest house. There’s a 320-square-foot cantilevered deck and an infinity swimming pool, too.
“Years in the making, this is a house unlike any on the planet,” according to the official property listing.
Architect Martin Tarafdar designed and built the house. The project started with a great imagination. There are no buildings around the property to provide stimulus for conceptual inspiration, Tarafdar said, but there is a lot of wild land and miles and miles of trees.
“As an architect, I look for a way to blend into (the surroundings) to some degree, but still stand out,” he told The Sacramento Bee. “I look to borrow from the neighborhood, but really nothing is out here, so I started looking at the landscape. I started looking at the serpentine elements everywhere.”
He saw a considerable variety of serpentine imagery in the Folsom Lake area known as Rattlesnake Bar. He saw the way the American River flows as it feeds into the lake. He saw the profile of the Sierra foothills. And, of course, there were all those “rattlers.”
Tarafdar described his architectural concept for the Shipwreck House in notes he wrote:
“This natural imagery, together with the proximity to waterfront of Folsom Lake and very rugged terrain, including numerous granite outcroppings at the site, drove the project conceptually from the very beginning; nautical imagery, images of a shipwreck, a vessel racked against the outcrops was envisioned. The nautical imagery would serve to assimilate the serpentine imagery.”
Once he had the concept down, Tarafdar sketched the entire design in just a couple of hours.
He said the nautical theme works as a nexus between the architecture, structure and all of the property’s integrated solar technologies.
“In this way the water-collecting warped butterfly profile for the main level roof geometry was conceived, along with its serpentine valley beam, which, when viewed from the interior, becomes evocative of the warped underside of a ship’s hull, or the skeletal remains of a rattlesnake,” Tarafdar explained.
Shipwreck House’s most prominent feature might be its “sail”-like roof, which can collect and store 12,000 gallons of rainwater. The house’s passive and active solar design is connected to the power grid and sells energy back to PG&E.
The home has been sitting on the market for more than a year, but Tarafdar and Keith, the listing agent, agree it will take a special buyer to commit to the Shipwreck House.
Keith believes the property would be a good corporate retreat.
The price has dropped gradually since it was relisted in 2018 for $2.9 million. In March 2010, it was listed for sale at $4.3 million, according to realtor.com. The home’s construction began in 2006.
But the price is beside the point. Tarafdar compares somebody buying the house to purchasing a sports car or other expensive toy.
“For this price, there are not a lot of amenities,” he said. “It’s very raw and that’s intentional. It’s a place to hang out part of the year or get away.”
Even so, the property provides a lot of bang for the buck. Shipwreck House sits on one acre and is surrounded by trees with unobstructed views of the lake and rugged mountains without a house in sight. The property features cutting-edge construction, the greenest technology and great energy efficiency.
There is a commercial-style, stainless steel kitchen, a detached studio guest house, where Tarafdar is living, with a full bathroom and a detached three-car garage. The interior features ocean blue floors “to appear flooded,” Tarafdar said, and 12-foot ceilings highlighting the views.
For being such a unique architectural building, the Shipwreck House almost didn’t happen. It rose from a problem that needed to be solved.
The main issue was a lack of adequate soil for percolation. Because of septic requirements, the structure had to be elevated. The solution called for an unconventional approach: elevating and cantilevering the structure over what little good soil was available to use for leach lines.
“What happens with these things is they always start with a problem,’ Tarafdar said. “The property was considered unbuildable. Everybody was telling me it was considered unbuildable, but I was so blown away by the property. ... I thought there was a way I could build, so I bought it.”
