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With Vulcan as My Landscaper Published: June 30, 2005 New York Times (excerpt)
At dusk in the Puna district of the Big Island, where Kilauea is still erupting, Craig Steely, a 40-year-old architect from San Francisco, gazes out the floor-to-ceiling windows of his modernist house floating ethereally on a 1955 lava field, admiring the caldera's crimson reflection some 20 miles away in the clouds. The simplicity of line, the sleek structure of glass and steel, is designed to be an elegant object framing the lava, "a balance between rough and refined," he said. With two new houses in the works, Mr. Steely is doing for lava what Gwathmey Siegel did for Long Island potato fields. A client who lives in another Steely house, Robert S. Trickey, a San Francisco designer and upholsterer, keeps his furniture to a minimum so as not to compete with his vistas of jagged virgin lava. "The Chinese had rock gardens," Mr. Trickey said dreamily. "I have lava." He relishes the austere unconventional beauty of it all but has yet to set foot in his front yard, which he calls a "reverse terrarium." Both he and Mr. Steely, who commutes from San Francisco to his lava pad with his wife, Cathy Liu, 36, a painter, and their son, Zane, 2, are well aware of the risks. "There is an element of danger," Mr. Trickey said. "But that makes life rich." The frisson may be easier to accept in a second home, Mr. Steely said. "The volcano is so immediate and fresh," he said. "You're constantly reminded how fragile life is."
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