343 Serpentine Drive

Herbert B. Turner reached Del Mar by way of West Point. Born in Mount Vernon, New York in 1926 and raised in Saranac Lake, he graduated from the academy in 1949, studied painting under Robert Brackman and Naum Los at the National Academy of Design, then drove west and took the least glamorous job in American architecture: apprentice to John Lloyd Wright, son of Frank Lloyd Wright, in his Del Mar studio from 1952 to 1955, at seventy five cents an hour plus room and board.

He stayed. After a stretch in Dale Naegle's office he opened his own design build practice in town and spent the following decades building into the Del Mar hills, more than fifty residential and commercial structures in all, while keeping a parallel life as a painter and sculptor whose work showed at the San Diego Museum of Art and, in 2013, in a retrospective at the Oceanside Museum of Art.

Modern San Diego's index of Turner's built work lists 343 Serpentine Drive as the Richard Rypinsky Residence, dated 1963. It is a textbook case of the philosophy Turner named terramonics: the design follows the topography of the lot, and the vegetation already on the site is kept rather than cleared. The house was set down among the trees of an 11,800 square foot flag lot, tucked behind the street off Serpentine Drive, without regrading the land around it.

Four bedrooms and two baths across 2,153 square feet, organized around glass. Whole walls of it, with French doors opening onto private decks. White oak floors run through the house against wood walls and wood ceilings, and the living room and its large adjoining deck face the Pacific, white water visible on clear days.

Del Mar Plaza, the village and the beach are minutes away. The quarter acre parcel just west of the house is offered for sale alongside it, room for a guest house, garages or a pool under the same trees.

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