1995 Waverley Street Palo Alto, Ca 94301
1995 Waverley Street is in the middle of one of Palo Alto’s most desirable locations, Waverley at Santa Rita. It is beautiful to look at, delightful to live in, and built to last. It is a dream house to be in, to relax in, to work in, to entertain in, to relax with family in, to read in, to sleep in, to wake in, to feel safe in: to live in. Keep reading to learn why it is such an extraordinary place to call home.
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Facts and numbers
Real estate descriptions traditionally begin with dry statistics about the house and breathless descriptions of its features. Here they are.
1995 Waverley Street has 5 bedrooms and 6 baths. It has a floor area of 6120 ft2 on a lot of 0.45 acres. Ground floor, second floor and fully-finished basement are connected by a front classic staircase and a rear spiral staircase.
The pro-grade kitchen is adjacent to the great room and formal dining area. The kitchen has 4 Thermador ovens (plus a microwave), a range top with 6 burners and a griddle, 2 refrigerators, 2 sinks, 2 dishwashers, a large walk-in pantry, vast 2-level black granite countertops, and dozens of drawers with ample room for every imaginable kitchen item. Prepare with ease a meal for 2 or for 50. A large outdoor kitchen through the back door a few steps away provides additional capacity to feed even more guests.
Formal living room has a high vaulted ceiling and a fireplace that can be easily converted to gas (the gas line is installed and ready). It has 10 magnificent windows. Above the fireplace is a wide marble wall that extends to the ceiling; it is a perfect place to display large art or sculpture.
The great room incorporates the kitchen and the formal dining area. It has a gas fireplace, wiring and an equipment cabinet for any sort of multimedia, and a Nana door that can open to the back patio for more room.
The dining area has windows on 3 walls, a skylight on the ceiling, and 3 forms of direct and indirect lighting. It seats 12, but since it is adjacent to the great room, it is easy to seat another 12. A side and back patio can provide connected outdoor seating for 20 more.
There is a dedicated office on the ground floor, with built-in cabinetry, large work spaces, and computer stations. The cabinetry can hold 3 printers and has power, lighting, built-in conduit, cat6 wiring, and multimode fiber to connect them invisibly. Conduit and wiring also connect the office to a tech room in the basement.
The master bedroom has a vaulted wood ceiling, plaster walls, a gas fireplace, wiring and conduit for invisible connections to media systems, and a balcony overlooking the back yard. The en-suite master bath has a separate WC, shower with skylight, whirlpool bath, marble counters, a large vanity with good natural light, and a huge architect-designed closet with built-in dressers, shoe storage, and a slide-out full-length mirror.
The second-floor library has built-in bookshelves to hold 2000 books, seating room for several people, and a balcony overlooking the formal living area.
The two bedrooms that share the second floor with the library and the master bedroom each have sliding doors to provide en-suite privacy when needed. Each of the adjacent baths is fully equipped and beautifully rendered in tile and glass and stone.
The ground-floor bedroom is adjacent to a bath, has its own door to the outside, and is wired so that it could easily be converted to a second office or workroom if desired. That ground-floor bath also has its own door to the outside, where a small patio provides some private space.
The bedroom in the basement could be repurposed in many ways. Its anteroom is wired for big-screen home theater and surround sound.
A spacious and beautiful stone-floor hallway joins the front and back of the house. Overlooking it is a second-floor “gallery” open area that can be an exercise area, play area, or lounge area.
Interiors
Most rooms have ceilings lined with unstained Douglas fir that matches windows and cabinets. Floors are red oak (fir is too soft to use for flooring) but the unstained floor closely matches the color of the unstained ceiling.
Below the fir is a soffit around the room perimeter. Hidden in that soffit is soft T5 fluorescent lighting, which is reflected by the wood to deliver very warm indirect illumination. Each room also has 2700ºK MR16 downlights. These lights are all on dimmers, and provide crisp or soft lighting as needed. At the time of original construction, 2700ºK LED MR16 bulbs did not exist, so halogen bulbs were used. Any bulb that has needed replacement was replaced with an LED. As appropriate, rooms have various additional specialty lighting such as chandeliers or sconces or wall wash.
Bedrooms have custom fir built-in closets and dressers with granite countertops (the same absolute black granite used elsewhere, of course). Bathrooms have a mixture of limestone and slate, used in a different pattern in each room.
Every room has built-in cabinetry, all in matching fir. The front bedroom on the second floor has a large built-in bookcase that swings open to reveal a very large “secret” closet useful for storing larger objects used infrequently.
A good-sized laundry room with a sink and new Electrolux appliances holds a built-in laundry hamper. A laundry chute from the second floor sends laundry down into that hamper.
Outdoors
The house opens to the outdoors on all four sides. Large Nana doors lead to a large side patio with a fireplace and a back patio just outside the kitchen door. A continuous slate pathway leads from the front porch to that back patio, inviting and guiding you.
A 50-by-16 foot heated swimming pool with integral spa graces the back yard. It uses a Jandy chlorine generator to produce chlorine from salt mixed with the pool water at a concentration of 3200 PPM, which is not noticeable to occupants of the pool. A pool house with half-bath provides a convenient changing area, and there is a heated outdoor shower for after-swim convenience.
Landscape design, installation, and current maintenance are by Notable Gardens of Palo Alto and Novato. This house and its gardens were selected for 2013 by the prestigious Gamble Garden Club as one of 5 sites on its fabled city garden tour. At the edge of the pool seating area is a large outdoor kitchen with Lynx grill and side burners, a Viking outdoor refrigerator, and cold running water. The grill is new; even Lynx grills need to be replaced eventually.
The long driveway is ecologically sound pervious concrete. Rain falling on it soaks through quickly and does not run off or enter storm sewers. An electric gate across the driveway keeps pedestrians out and pets in. The gate itself is beautiful 8-gauge hammered copper, made by a local artisan, mounted in a strong steel frame.
Garage
At the end of the driveway is a spacious and well-lit 2-car garage. It is fitted with a 10kw level-2 EVSE charging station, and has a dozen cabinets and drawers to hold things that belong in a garage. One of those cabinets contains tools and supplies for the pool. The garage is wired to support a WiFi access point should one be desired there.
Design and materials
1995 Waverley Street was designed by Montgomery Anderson, AIA and his firm of Cody Anderson Wasney. Design principles included natural light, simplicity, and a small number of locally sourced materials. Most of the house uses just 5 materials: straight-grain fir, plaster, oak flooring, limestone, and granite. A large number of windows let in natural light from every direction.
An important characteristic of the design is the use of light. Every room in 1995 Waverley has as many windows as structurally sensible. Even the staircases have windows. The dining room has windows on 3 sides and the ceiling, and is open to the family room on the 4th side. The kitchen has very few eye-level cabinets, which would block sight lines to the windows, relying instead on plentiful drawers and a large pantry. With careful thought and planning, the design is 100% compliant with California’s Title 24 Building Energy Efficiency Standards.
The ground floor is fully accessible, and one of the two staircases was built so that it could be converted to an elevator shaft should the need ever arise.
The interior walls are Venetian plaster, and all of its corners are rounded. The plaster and rounding contributes to the sense of softness that blankets the house. Exposed wood ceilings, wood floors, beveled-glass transoms, and somewhat-rustic window textiles also contribute to an overall organic feel. The only square corners are the door jambs.
All of the wood floors are red oak; all other wood except mantelpieces is Douglas fir from the same region of California. Fir is too soft for floors and mantelpieces. The floors and full bathroom walls use the same Jerusalem Gold limestone and “red” slate tiles, though in varying patterns and shapes.
Most countertops are granite or limestone, but one bathroom has a porcelain countertop custom made by a San Jose porcelain craftsman.
As much as possible, the building materials were sourced locally. The fir used in ceilings, cabinets, and windows comes from northern California; the oak flooring comes from southern Oregon. The limestone comes from a quarry north of San Francisco. The dramatic roof tiles are from the famous Gladding McBean factory and quarry in Lincoln, California. There is no local slate quarry, so the slate was sourced from India.
Windows were custom manufactured by the Marvin Window and Door Company of Warroad, Minnesota, using fir visually similar to the fir used elsewhere in the house (they source their fir from Minnesota forests). Interior doors and exterior doors to the side and rear were also made by Marvin. The massive hardwood front door was made by a local craftsman. All door hardware is by Rocky Mountain Hardware of Sun Valley, Idaho. The big folding glass doors that open onto rear and side patios were custom made by NanaWall in Corte Madera, California.
The exterior of the house is 4-coat fiberglass-reinforced stucco, with Douglas fir used for the wood accents that carry the design theme. The exterior wood is finished with Sikkens varnish, manufactured in the Netherlands by Akzo Nobel. Sikkens was developed as a marine varnish for ships in the North Sea, but has found use anywhere that wood is exposed to the elements.
Entertaining
1995 Waverley is ideal for many kinds of entertainment, be it cocktails in the formal living room, seated dinner in the dining room, or a big outdoor reception. The indoor kitchen easily supports any sort of large or small meal, and with the addition of the outdoor kitchen, a large number of people can be served.
The long high counter in the kitchen is ideal to hold a buffet line, and the short walk from the kitchen to the formal dining room makes table service simple. A wall-mounted china cabinet with accompanying lowboy holds china and glassware service for 50 along with tablecloths, place mats, and serving platters.
Two dishwashers expedite cleanup.
Relaxing
There are several areas in the house that are ideal for solo or couple relaxation. The great room is the usual informal gathering spot. The formal living room is quiet, and the 2nd-floor seating areas in the library and the gallery are cozy places to sit and read or think. All of them have excellent WiFi coverage, of course.
Construction
California is earthquake country. 1995 Waverley is engineered and built to withstand significant quakes. The foundation and all poured concrete is double-reinforced (two sets of rebar everywhere). All concrete hardness measurements were approximately 4000PSI or better. There are numerous oversized steel beams and welded rectangular steel wall frames. Exterior walls are framed with 2×8 lumber, bolted to the steel frames when adjacent. Floors and roof are framed with 2×12 for additional strength. There are hundreds of steel ties in the framing, each helps make the frame stronger.
Most floors have hydronic heating with poured concrete slabs protecting the tubing. The rigidity of those slabs contributes to the rigidity of the entire structure. A 5-room basement was built with state-of-the-art membrane-based waterproofing coordinated with the foundation pours, to ensure that no groundwater will leak into the basement.
Pouring a concrete foundation requires a steady stream of concrete trucks. Each truck arrives early and waits for its turn to be connected to the concrete pump. One driver (who delivers concrete for a living) commented while he was waiting “Wow. When the big earthquake happens, I’m coming over to this house.”
Utility and Technology
There is a certain amount of technology built into the house, but it is not tech-intensive. Rooms have ordinary light switches and not computer-controlled lighting systems. There is no audio built in, because the architect understood that technology changes so fast that anything built in would be quaint and obsolete within a decade. All utilities enter underground.
Electrical and communication
1995 Waverley has a 400-amp underground electric feed, split into several interior breaker panels. One of those breaker panels is wired so that it can be used with an industrial UPS (uninterruptible power supply) and there is physical space and pre-wiring to enable its straightforward installation in a 19-inch rack or cabinet. Conduits through basement walls would support an outdoor generator or fuel cell installation.
Every room in the house (except baths) has at least one wall plate wired with RJ45 (cat5e and cat6), with multimode fiber with LC connectors, and with RG59 coax. Every new communication technology developed in the last quarter century can be connected via fiber and/or cat6, which provides comfortable future-proofing. Should WiFi ever prove not to be up to the task of supporting something new, the per-room fiber and cable technology will do it.
There are 6 WiFi stations pre-wired with ethernet wire and AC power (only 3 of them have been used, because those were found to provide full coverage). Active WiFi mesh nodes are in the kitchen breakfast nook, the master bedroom linen cabinet, and the corridor connecting the front hallway to the nearby bathroom. The basement bedroom and the behind-the-bookcase closet in the front 2nd-floor bedroom are also wired for WiFi hot spots, but were not needed. The 6th hot spot location is inside the garage, for the use of cars parked there.
The master bedroom, the family room, and the kitchen have mounts intended for televisions, with in-wall conduit from behind the mount to a cabinet intended for media electronics. Each of these 1¼ inch conduits can accommodate 4 or 5 cables such as HDMI, RG6, or ethernet. There is also conduit in the office room from the primary workstation to the printer closet.
Tech room
In the basement, not far from the furnace room, is the tech room. It is the hub of all of the house’s cabling, and it is the master point of entry for telco, cable, and fiber utilities. A 25-pair telco MPOE is inside the tech room. Technically the MPOE belongs to AT&T even though it is inside the house, but by putting it inside, there is no exterior access to the underground phone lines, so they cannot be cut or wiretapped. A 2-post 19-inch telco rack and two 4-post 19-inch cabinets hold cross-connects and utility devices (such as security camera controllers and internet switches and routers). There are 4-inch conduits running from the tech room to the roof; they open at a hard-to-notice access cabinet on each intermediate floor, to allow access and easy recabling. Those access cabinets have electric power available.
The tech room has its own air conditioning system, which would be needed if servers or high-wattage devices are installed.
The tech room is the entrance point for the single-mode fiber that connects to the Palo Alto Internet Exchange (PAIX). It can be cross-connected to any of the dozens of ISPs present there. Use of the fiber requires a monthly fee paid to City of Palo Alto Utilities, and its far-end termination at one of those ISPs will need to be contracted by the house buyer.
Rooftop, surveillance, and alarm
Hidden in the roof (not visible from the ground, but you can see it in aerial photos) is a large rectangular platform suitable for satellite dishes. It holds the Bryant heat pump that serves the second floor, and also holds a solid-state weather station from Vaisala (Finland), sold and supported in the US by Columbia Weather Systems (Hillsboro, Oregon). The rooftop weather station is connected to a readout in the pantry (off the kitchen) but can be connected to the internet with accessories available from Columbia Weather Systems. Anticipating such a connection, a cable from the rooftop station runs to the tech room. Access to the roof is through a skylight near the top of the spiral stairs; a custom-fit ladder is in a nearby closet.
Also on the roof is an amplified GPS antenna that has been used for specialty communication and clock service but is not currently in use. GPS signal cables appear in the conduit access cabinets and in the tech room.
Five exterior surveillance cameras connect to power-over-ethernet (POE) in the tech room. There is wiring for two additional cameras, which are is not currently installed. The cameras are connected to a private NAT network that cannot be accessed from outside the tech room; they are connected to a Mac Mini running SecuritySpy software, which can be made externally visible via an adjustment of the router configuration.
A comprehensive fire and intruder alarm system was included in the construction of the house; its sensor wires run inside the walls and door and window frames. It was installed and is monitored by Fox Security of San Carlos, a local company specializing in Silicon Valley security needs. Its control panel is in the tech room. It uses a dedicated telephone line, which is one of the reasons why the telephone service enters underground.
Heating, cooling, and plumbing
The main water supply pipe is 1 inch type K copper. The installed water meter is 5/8” for water conservation, but if a more robust supply is ever needed, the pipes are there.
There are two separate heating systems, with separate thermostats. A 9-zone hydronic (heated floor) system is the primary heating source. It uses a Munchkin boiler in the basement with two separate circulation pumps. One 3-zone Bryant forced-air heating and cooling system is located in the basement and another is on the roof. The basement system serves the ground floor and the roof system serves the second floor. Having two systems means that there is less ductwork, which reduces the need to make holes and cuts in the house framing, which would weaken it. A third, smaller air conditioning system (Mitsubishi “Mr Slim”) provides cooling to the basement tech room, which enables high-wattage server devices to be placed there if desired.
Hot water is provided by 3 Rinnai on-demand hot water heaters. One is in the kitchen pantry, one is on the roof just above the master bath, and the third is in the closet behind the pool house to supply the outdoor shower.
Drainage for the basement sink is enabled by an under-sink ejector pump. There are two sump pumps. One, outside, at the bottom of the basement stairs, ensures that in a protracted heavy rainstorm the stairwell does not flood. The other, in the heating/cooling room, ensures that condensate spills or accidental hydronic system leaks are removed. The sump pump at the bottom of the basement stairs is wired so that it could easily be powered by a generator or UPS, should one be installed.