Shipwreck House – architectural marvel near Folsom Lake – heads to auction
One of the most unique homes in the Sacramento region — the Shipwreck House, which had been listed for $2.85 million — will head to auction in April.
The house is an architectural marvel of nautical and serpentine imagery that offers stunning views of Folsom Lake and the mountains.
Spark Auction will handle the online sale beginning April 10, 2021, with an opening bid is $1.75 million.
“This house is about energy, about interacting with it,” according to the seller’s remarks on the auction website. “It’s about having fun, It’s about reinventing the wheel not because it’s necessary but because it is fun. This is a house perpetually waiting for a party.”
“You’ve never seen anything like the Shipwreck House,” realtor.com wrote in an article.
Spark Auction put it another way: “This house is like no other on the planet; performing an unprecedented solar energy trick unique in all the world. A perfect getaway or corporate retreat with detached guest quarters.”
At its most basic, the sustainable home, located at 3599 Hector Road in Newcastle, California, features three bedrooms and four bathrooms stretching over 4,466 square feet of living space. The home sits on one acre. There’s a 320-square-foot cantilevered deck and an infinity swimming pool, too.
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 previously 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.”
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 price of the home had gradually dropped 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.
Shipwreck House 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.
This story was originally published March 19, 2021 at 10:04 AM.
