He and his wife, Cristiana, revitalized a run-down property for less than $250K partly by swapping his coveted work with friends and vendors.
For several years, Joe and Cristiana Skoby rented a home just one blissful block from the beach in San Diego’s La Jolla neighborhood. It was a historic adobe cottage with a garden they had filled with lush plants. Joe, a fishmonger and ceramicist known for his textured surfaces and organic, knocked-in shapes, had a tiny studio under a corrugated roof. "Joe is the oldest soul you can meet," Cristiana says. "And I’m from Europe—I didn’t mind a smaller place. But it was 907 square feet with two bedrooms and one bath. We had a growing business and a growing family."
Cristiana and Joe Skoby spent two years looking for a house that would accommodate their family of five, could be a canvas for their Italy-meets-California style, and would fit their budget. They were able to turn a dreary 1960s house in San Diego into a dreamy home—with a lot of creativity, sweat equity, and help from their community.
Photo by Jeovanna Pérez
Wanting more space, in 2021, the Skobys started looking—and looking. They had a strong community in La Jolla, Joe is a dedicated surfer, and they loved raising their three children on the beach. "I was only going to move from La Jolla for a dream house," says Cristiana, who worked for Dolce & Gabbana in her native Italy and now manages Joe’s art business.
But La Jolla, once an artists’ colony, has seen its modest cottages replaced with mansions. Prices have become especially heartbreaking since the pandemic. After two years of browsing, Cristiana spotted a listing for $900,000 in Clairemont, the next neighborhood inland. It looked like the opposite of a dream house—a coffin-like entryway, low ceilings, a poky layout, and bright blue wall-to-wall carpeting in the bedroom that switched to gray in the bathroom. The backyard was bare dirt and invasive ice plants.
After Joe saw the wood carvings his friend Matthew Wignall was doing, he asked if the artist would be interested in making a door. Joe and Cristiana gave him no direction, and it was the largest piece he had undertaken. The result is a showstopper of an entry that sets the tone for the house: original, earthy, handmade.
Photo by Collin Erie
The Skobys combined the original walled-off entryway, kitchen, living room, and dining area into one bright, open space. To vault the ceilings, they had to install a 26-foot-long central support beam. The clerestory windows they added give the house the feel of an iconic midcentury.
Spanning nearly six acres, the contemporary estate includes a main house, a pair of guest residences, and a saltwater pool.
Location: 496 Haines Road, Bedford Corners, New York 10549
Price: $6,500,000
Year Built: 2025
Footprint: 7,213 square feet (5 Beds, 4 Baths)
Lot Size: 5.93 Acres
From the Agent: "Drawing inspiration from the organic principles pioneered by visionaries such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Haines House continues that tradition by blending art and environment to create a harmonious balance with timeless intent. This property is all about comfort, privacy and security. The great room is wrapped in glass, framing uninterrupted views in every direction. A central fireplace anchorsthe open plan, warming the kitchen, dining area, and a sunken lounge. The main residence offers four bedrooms and four-and-a-half bathrooms. The primary suite occupies the uppermost level, complete with dual baths, a sitting room, an office, and direct access to a secluded terrace. Beyond the residences, the estate invites both recreation and reflection. Two guest pavilions connected by a luminous glass corridor echo the architectural rhythm of the main residence while maintaining their own sense of privacy. A saltwater pool shimmers in the sun, and a versatile sports court awaits play."
Spanning nearly six acres, the contemporary estate includes a main house, a pair of guest residences, and a saltwater pool.
Photo by Modern Angles
The property includes a sizable saltwater pool.
Photo by Modern Angles
A glass-enclosed hallway connects two guest accommodations.
Disturbed by the separation between the average American house and its lawn, Rose crafted an unconventional space that dissolved the boundary between interior and exterior.
Welcome to From the Archive, a look back at stories from Dwell’s past. This story previously appeared in the October 2006 issue.
Approaching the door of the James Rose house on a corner lot in Ridgewood, New Jersey, you are not greeted by the typical velvety emerald lawn or picture windows politely set back from the street. After locating the entrance of the cinder block, wood, thatch, and fiberglass structure embedded in foliage, you ascend a few steps to enter a room dappled with light, hear the splashing of a fountain, and wonder, Why can’t I live here?
Once dubbed the James Dean of landscape architecture, Rose (1913-1991) was a rebel with a cause, expelled from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in 1937 for producing modernistic landscape designs rather than pastoral watercolor renderings in the formal Beaux Arts style. In 1938 and ’39, Rose and former classmates Garrett Eckbo and Dan Kiley put forth their design philosophies in a series of influential articles in Pencil Points magazine (now Progressive Architecture), and helped propel landscape architecture into the modern world.
Photos by Frederick Charles
"It’s hard to remember, but Rose was once the East Coast landscape architect of choice," says Dean Cardasis, director of the James Rose Center, and the person most responsible for rehabilitating Rose’s home and, to some degree, his reputation. "Before Kiley did the Miller Garden and became the darling of modern architects, Rose had a thriving international practice." He was also a prolific writer and guest lecturer. But Rose quickly tired of corporate life, preferring to leave Manhattan and work from home, where he could focus on the kinds of residential projects that allowed him to improvise with the real medium of landscape—rocks, dirt, and plants.
Rose was far more concerned about the experience of being inside the garden—he compared it to a sculpture that one moves through—than creating a pretty backdrop for the house. And he preferred working with existing materials, explaining, "I don’t bring in rocks to look at them or talk to them, but rocks that are on the site I try to use, instead of digging a hole to bury them as if they were something obscene." Although he created hundreds of gardens in New England and elsewhere, his undisputed masterwork is the project for which he was both architect and client, and which he completed in 1953.
Rose first started ruminating on his ideal dwelling when stationed in Okinawa during World War II. Upon his return, he was repelled by the proliferation of housing developments that thoughtlessly plunked a house in the middle of the lot—creating a useless front lawn and treating the garden as an afterthought. For him, the ideal house was inseparable from the site, rather than "imposed upon" it.
Working on a modest lot (described by Rose as "half a tennis court"), he placed three pavilions—a main house with a kitchen for his mother, a guesthouse for his sister, and a live/work studio for himself—joined by a tightly choreographed connective tissue of courtyards, pools, and gardens. Affording three adults both privacy and communion with nature, the property at Ridgewood embodies the midcentury ideal, so rarely realized, of blurring the borders between indoors and out. Wrote Rose: "The walls become garden walls instead of barriers. The landscape is of the house instead of attached to it, and the space is one."
"It’s hard to tell if it’s a landscape connected by shelter, or shelters connected by a common landscape," says Cardasis. "Rose essentially took the architecture and pulled it apart, with the solid parts and the voids exploded. I think of it as architectural origami."
Images courtesy Frederick Charles / James Lord / Dean Cardasis / James Rose Archive Center
For all its obvious delights, the "small village," as Rose called it, was no more enthusiastically received by the neighbors than his theories had been at Harvard. "The idea sat on the local New Jersey cerebellum like hair that comes with the hat," wrote Rose. "Everyone in Ridgewood knows what a house is. The building inspector drew one for me, gratuitously, the day I applied for a building permit, and showed me just how to place it on the lot." Rose, however, found creative ways to skirt annoying codes that impeded his privacy. In one area screened with posts, he responded to complaints by saying, "It’s not a fence, it’s a pole arrangement." "Actually," he wrote, "I took great pains not to violate any codes. I followed them to the letter, and made them work for me—much to the inspector’s dismay."
In the ’7os, Rose added a partially sheltered second-story roof deck/tree house that connects to the garden via a spiral staircase. When his mother became infirm, he joined her house to his sister’s, creating new alfresco areas, such as the Buddha garden. For the man who wrote "‘finish’ is another word for death," change was part of the master plan: "I set up the basic armature of walls, and roofs, and open spaces to establish their relationships, but left it free in detail to allow for improvisation. In that way it would never be ‘finished,’ but constantly evolving...a metamorphosis such as we find, commonly, in nature."
About Rose’s perfect fusion of Western and Eastern approaches, landscape architect Richard Haag wrote, "To oversimplify, Western residential forms are walls fending off nature, a man’s home is his castle. Traditional Japanese homes are structures of openings, a man’s home is his temple." Rose’s Ridgewood is both—a place of comfort and serenity, but no monastic retreat.
In terms of capturing the experience of living there, perhaps Rose said it best: "From my point of view it was a happy house. From the moment it was enclosed, something happened acoustically that made voices sound beautiful. It had an earthy quality that made people look and act like characters in a Chekhov play; artificial poses were impossible. But especially, it had its own moods—the moods of nature. Sunlight falls in the right places, and it is capable of dramatic change with the occasion, with the season, and with the time of day."
It’s part of a satin-finished "box" that encloses the kitchen and creates distinction between old and new.
Houses We Love: Every day we feature a remarkable space submitted by our community of architects, designers, builders, and homeowners. Have one to share? Post it here.
From the Architect: "This apartment located on the third floor of a post-WWI bâtiment on Viale Beatrice d’Este in Milan has undergone a refurbishment by DDBA. The residence, featuring a typically bourgeois character, is distinguished by large French windows overlooking rows of poplars and the vibrantly colored facades of the residential buildings directly opposite, designed by Giordano Forti and Camillo Magni. The project was born from a collaboration with the clients, a creative couple seeking a Milanese pied-à-terre.
"The renovation, begun in 2021 and completed two years later, unfolds through two opposing yet complementary architectural codes that coexist and perfectly support one another within the home. The first code celebrates the building’s heritage, preserving the original partitions and enhancing the early 20th-century atmosphere in the bedrooms and living area. The second, by contrast, introduces a hyper-contemporary element: an independent functional ‘box’ with a satin-finish metal shell, inserted in place of the old entrance, which houses the kitchen and utilities. The two styles—utilizing different materials, colors, and lighting—generate a play of counterpoints and dissonances, creating a dynamic, multifaceted environment rich in contrasts. The apartment’s approximately 860 square feet are distributed across the living area, the home studio, the primary bedroom, the kitchen, and the bathroom.
"The entry is through a gallery with a dark, lowered vault, recalling the corridors of Villa Panza di Biumo and the architecture of Portaluppi. This gallery runs alongside the functional service and kitchen box, leading—with a sharp and surprising ‘change of scene’—to the high ceilings and luminous spaces of the living area. In the living room, a few selected pieces of contemporary design (primarily black USM modules in various configurations) cohabit with the vintage elegance of the rooms, emphasized by the herringbone oak flooring and the original fixtures, which have been restored and white-lacquered. The Klein-blue sofa harmonizes with the electric blue facade of the building opposite, while the stainless-steel bookshelves echo the metallic finishes of the kitchen box. The kitchen itself can choose to open its doors, connecting with the rustic dining table, or close itself off with discretion and privacy.
"The small studio, designed as a transformable multitasking space, becomes an additional guest room thanks to the fitted wall behind a dark curtain, which conceals cabinetry and a Murphy bed. The primary bedroom, essential in its furnishings, is enriched by a bright orange USM unit and a large canvas by artist Jaime Hayon."
MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects designs a humble, "fish shack fabulous" house on stilts with a grand upper-level living area.
When Corey and Jennifer Everett set out to build a house in Nova Scotia—where they first met two decades ago—they wanted more than a typical vacation home. Living in Ontario but longing for the Maritime province, they searched online for years before finding a sloping lot in Upper Kingsburg.
Not only was the location "breathtaking," says Corey—close to protected conservation land and Lunenburg, a world UNESCO heritage site—but the land was owned by architect-developer MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects. "We had the opportunity to work with Brian and his team as the architects," says Corey. "That made the property all that more interesting to me."
Architect Brian MacKay-Lyons and his firm had already built 50 dwellings in this peninsula village over 40 years in an ongoing experiment in community-making, and it’s the place where his own family has put down roots. "If I look out the window, I see my daughter’s house and her horse farm just down the road from these guys," he says.
For the Everetts, MacKay-Lyons set out to design what he calls an "upside-down house"—a 1,050-square-foot, two-bedroom home where you live upstairs and sleep on the lower floor. Since the tricky site slopes from road to creek, stilts offered an economical base. "It floats," says the architect. "You’re up in the air like a birdhouse."
A birdhouse that puts a contemporary spin on the classic Nova Scotia fisherman’s cottage—so much so, Corey says, that they jokingly coined the term "fish shack fabulous" to capture the project’s aesthetic.
Vaulted ceilings and rich hardwood floors introduce the expansive main level, where a stone fireplace anchors the living room. A formal dining room is marked by crisp modern millwork and glass French doors that open out onto the deck. The culinary heart of the home is a chef’s kitchen, seamlessly integrated with a bespoke, built-in breakfast table. Transitioning into the everyday quarters, a sophisticated family room boasts a second hearth and detailed coffered ceilings. From here, sliding doors reveal a light-filled, four-season sunroom—a flawless transition to the property’s outdoor oasis. This outdoor footprint includes a swimming pool, outdoor kitchen, temperature controlled four-season glass atrium with accordion windows, sport court, and a gated parking pad for guests.
Upstairs, the second level serves as a private family retreat, hosting two secondary bedrooms, a dedicated laundry room, and a primary suite. This sanctuary is anchored by a third fireplace and flanked by dual custom walk-in closets, culminating in a spa-like en suite bath outfitted with a double vanity, a deep soaking tub, and a steam shower.
Find a dedicated entertainment destination on the top floor, where a sprawling game room features a full wet bar, a versatile guest suite or home office, and two private sky decks. Finally, the home’s lower level grounds the property with functionality, offering an expansive recreation room, a private guest bedroom with a full bath, a secondary laundry station, and access to the attached garage.
Additional callouts include heated sidewalks, front steps, and parking pad, amazing natural light throughout, arched transitions and doorways, designer light fixtures, an abundance of storage, composite decking, irrigation, and professional landscaping. There is also private neighborhood security with multiple cars working each night.
Listing Details
Bedrooms: 5
Baths: 4 full, 1 partial
Year Built: 2005
Square Feet: 6,031
Courtesy of Jameson Sotheby's International Realty
Courtesy of Jameson Sotheby's International Realty
Courtesy of Jameson Sotheby's International Realty
Transparent partitions create sight lines to the living area and dining room, emphasizing a sense of connection.
Houses We Love: Every day we feature a remarkable space submitted by our community of architects, designers, builders, and homeowners. Have one to share? Post it here.
From the Architect: "The apartment is located within a refined residential building, whose character is already evident in the rationalist language of its entrance hall. Purchased by the owner more than thirty years ago, the home had gradually fallen out of step with the person living in it. Fragmented rooms and rigid hierarchies no longer reflected a daily life shaped by movement, conviviality, and sharing, nor the increasingly central role that cooking had come to play. The intervention therefore began as a broader realignment: a contemporary rewriting of the interior, restoring a dialogue between the house and its inhabitant. Upon entering, the apartment reveals itself gradually through a continuous sequence of rooms connected by visual and physical thresholds. At the center of this system lies the kitchen, completely rethought as the core of the home.
"Enclosed by custom-made burgundy glazed partitions, the kitchen becomes a central volume that is both practical and relational, turning food preparation into a shared gesture connected to the rest of the home. Around this nucleus, the living area takes shape through the union of three former rooms. Each retains its own identity, yet all are held together by visual and material continuity. Underfoot, the original paneled parquet flooring has been carefully restored and runs uninterrupted throughout the space, while above, a fine burgundy line traces the walls, marking their height. The apartment’s original geometry is embraced rather than concealed: structural columns are integrated into custom oak joinery housing bookshelves and built-in seating, transforming a constraint into a functional device that organizes space and encourages interaction. The custom terrazzo flooring, designed with a geometric pattern, adds another layer of continuity between surfaces and furnishings.
"The dining room acts as a hinge between spaces. More intimate in character is the reading room, where the project shifts toward a tactile and secluded atmosphere. A custom book niche with integrated seating houses part of the owner’s extensive library. Here, tones deepen and the atmosphere becomes quieter and more protected.
"The result is a carefully balanced dialogue between permanence and transformation. Original elements such as the parquet flooring are reactivated through a new system of spatial and material interventions that redefine domestic life. What emerges is a home that adapts naturally, welcomes and connects, built around a renewed center and a more fluid, living continuity—one that holds past memories while making room for new ones."
