ESSENTIALS
Firm Name: Dyar Architecture
Principal: Erik Dyar
Headquarters: The Carmel Plaza, Suite 301, Carmel-by-the-Sea, CA
Accolades: Forbes Architecture’s “America’s Best-in-State Residential Architects,” 2025.
House Name: Carmelo
Location: Carmel-by-the-Sea, California
Lot Size: 4,000 square feet
Conditioned Area & Layout: 1,794 square feet, 2 BR, 3 BA
“You have to be rebellious to be creative. It is important to study a subject but not to overlearn it. If you do, you cannot take a fresh approach.”
—John H. Thodos (1934–2009), Carmel-by-the-Sea Architect
N
o one should ever be able to dictate what you do with your house.
Or should they? In California’s Carmel-by-the-Sea, the onetime colony of painters, poets, and writers founded in the Arts & Crafts movement’s crux of 1916, the city’s ever-stringent “residential design guidelines” and review-and-approvals proceedings grant it near-total control over what homeowners can and cannot do with their properties, down to the smallest of details. Carmel-by-the-Sea, with its tourism economy and resident population of about 3,000 dispersed over little more than 1 square mile, holds an incomparableness of character that leans heavily on one main physical attribute: the prevailing artistic “quality” of the local architecture’s stylistically varied traditions. By controlling the protection of this fundamental premise of the community’s identity as they do, Carmel-by-the-Sea keeps a firm grip on the preservation of its sense of place. Before any project gets built, the guidelines and those members of the city council charged with their enforcement have, in their extended efforts and to an extraordinary extent, directly challenged the integrity and reach of the project architect’s artistic and technical repertoires, along with that architect’s ability to communicate those concepts and practices through each stage of review. Here too, however, in the frequently long, strange trip toward the final analysis, architecture, like art, ultimately is subjective in appreciation.
As it affects matters of privacy, vistas, light, and the flow of air, roof height in the houses of Carmel-by-the-Sea is often a hotly debated issue in a house’s preliminary design review by the city council. ABOVE: Carmelo’s east-facing front elevation, as seen from the street. Solving the roof-height issue of a design that depended on two stories for its success, Dyar partially embedded the lower level.
Richard Olsen
Since the 1990s, the architect and Carmel resident Erik Dyar, of Dyar Architecture, has devoted himself to fighting this good fight, establishing his boutique practice as a source of progressively contextual design. Dyar’s among an all-too-small group of local practitioners that demonstrably brings an historian’s rigor to his understanding of period appropriateness in architectural design. Moreover, in practice, in work that is always supremely detailed and top-to-bottom architected, he consistently demonstrates how to deftly integrate a building—be it in the mode of Craftsman, or one of the Period Styles, or an iteration of Modernism’s San Francisco Bay Region tradition—with Carmel-by-the-Sea’s environmentally sensitive coastal-forest setting. “Doing” and articulating “what” is to be done and “why” are, of course, two separate skills, and Dyar makes both integral to his signature.
ABOVE: At the entrance, Dyar, known for his pronounced emphasis on harnessing natural light and, to that end, the use of glass not just for windows but as a primary building material, inserted the custom white oak door into a mitred-glass enclosure. Meanwhile, blue stone pavers play off the soffit’s clear vertical grain hemlock and, on the board-and-batten walls, stained Port Orford Cedar—all Dyar’s way of setting the tone with beautiful natural materials handled with restraint.
Adam Rouse
ABOVE: The living area has white oak flooring and a sealed travertine fire surround. A Bernard Trainor oil hangs above the fireplace.
ADAM Rouse
Dyar Architecture’s recently completed house, Carmelo, a Modernist cube dressed for the part in Port Orford cedar board and bat, the wood stained the color of Carmel fog and with the bats done in varying sizes and placements to impart a syncopated, ocean-swell-intervals rhythmic feel to the enclosure of the exteriors, is typical of his work. The architecture measurably surpasses the high bar established by the city’s residential design guidelines. In so doing, the house effectively elevates the appearance of the block it shares with its neighbors.
ABOVE: The kitchen, with its sealed travertine backsplash, has clear vertical grain white oak cabinetry—the same material used for the built-in shelving in the dining area and living area.
Adam rouse
Constructed on a 40’ x 100’ lot, the challengingly narrow typical canvas in Carmel-by-the-Sea, and being Modern in form, Carmelo’s design had to contend with the impossibility of establishing the desired horizontality of massing on which the Modern house usually depends for its visual “connection” to a site. Consequently, in the absence of the lot width needed to stretch the building out across the landscape from the perspective of the street, one’s visual interpretation shifts subtly to scale and then, in the final analysis, to the architect’s particular handling of the building’s proportions—voids and projections, and the dynamic relationships between each. The latter, as a driving tour of Carmel-by-the-Sea and its houses quickly confirms, is still one more area where Dyar’s work clearly separates itself from that of all but a few of his local contemporaries.
Small in scale, devoid of ostentation, and otherwise deferential to Carmel’s forest character—Dyar Architecture’s Carmelo connects the dots between Carmel-by-the-Sea’s architectural past and present. The house belongs. It’s an end that justifies the means.
ABOVE: The primary bedroom. Dyar gave it an operable clerestory window, not just for added light, but so the clients could let in the seabreeze and the sound of the waves. As throughout the house, the built-ins are clear vertical grain white oak.
Adam rouse
ABOVE: The primary bath’s walls and countertop are done in Calacatta marble. Here, too, Dyar brings natural light in from above.
Adam rouse
ABOVE: The south-west corner of the house reveals how Dyar carved voids out of the form to accommodate the lower-level guest room and media room. Throughout the landscape treatment, paved areas are intentionally avoided in favor of plantings.
Adam rouse
ABOVE: The architecture of the house’s west-facing rear elevation, with its partially subterranean lower-level spaces, low garden walls of granite, and hot tub, depicts Dyar’s uncommon proficiency with scale and proportion. The tightness of the typical Carmel-by-the-Sea lot begs for it.
Adam rouse
ABOVE: Upper floor plan
Dyar Architecture
ABOVE: Lower floor plan
Dyar Architecture