This 390 sq ft studio addition onto the owner/architect’s existing Sonoma home takes inspiration the site’s abundant pairs of Mourning Doves. A traditional country‘dovecote’houses pigeons or doves, sometimes freestanding but often built into the ends of houses or barns. The architect researched the most advantageous height, orientation, proportion, and ventilation to encourage nesting doves –a process that informed both the shape of the exterior and interior space.

Here, although hidden from the interior, twelve nesting boxes are built into the angled exterior façade,encouraging the bird’s co-habitation of the space as in more traditional dovecote structures. A lower bird-watching window focuses on the doves as they ground-feed and serves as convenient viewing spot for the owner’s two Spinone Italiano –Italian bird-dogs. A custom silk sheer panel divides the new space from the old with an image of a murmuration of swallows flocking. 

This highly personal and customized project by the architect-owner became a site for exploration and play.Neal Schwartz followed every intuition about details that might contribute to the space, hoping to stay just this side of‘too-much.’What unites the disparate details of this addition is a sense of movement, craft, and nature.