If there’s one thing Carl and Kay Thoresen want to hold on to in their new home at The Terraces of Los Gatos, it’s their privacy. They spent the last 30 years on 16 mountain acres with not a soul in sight except lots of forest friends.

Only five miles from The Terraces, their home in the Santa Cruz Mountains feels like a world away – “a night and day contrast,” Carl says.

The Thoresens have traded mountain views of sunrises across the Santa Clara Valley for sunsets from their third-floor apartment. Given that difference, Kay says she is surprised by how comfortable she is in her new home. “Here,” she says, “it’s easier physically than what we’ve had for a long time.”

Easier indeed. The Thoresens built their mountain home – “every bit of it,” Carl emphasizes – in a heavily wooded forest of redwoods and Douglas firs off Highway 17 near the Lexington Reservoir. But building the house was only the half of it. For 12 years, they intentionally shared the home with a second family.

“It was unusual,” Carl admits. “It was very seventies,” Kay adds.

The two families moved to the mountains in 1978 just as the valley boomed below. They had purchased the property 20 years earlier and spent two decades dreaming up a house that could accommodate two families and withstand an earthquake along a nearby tributary of the San Andreas Fault. They accomplished both.

They were all teachers. Kay was an elementary school teacher, Carl a psychology professor at Stanford University. Both graduates of the University of California, Berkeley, they met one summer while working at 
Yosemite National Park. They were married in the historic Yosemite chapel in 1958. Larry Johsens, the father of the second family, was a high school English teacher, and his wife, Vivian, taught middle school. The couples did a lot together, including building a boat, before they decided to build the house from scratch.

In the construction boom of the early 1970s, they couldn’t get a building contractor to even look at their property. “They just wouldn’t give us the time of day,” Carl says. So they decided to do it themselves. Being academics, they went to the library.

They had a lot of reading and learning to do. In his summers off from teaching, Larry took a blueprinting course then a surveying class. Neither family had a lot of money, so they counted on the expertise and generosity of skilled professionals they happened to meet. “When you seek, you will find,” Carl says.

One critical find was the architect. A former roommate of Carl’s at Berkeley told a San Francisco architect about the plans for the house. Part of a big firm, the architect was looking for a more meaningful hands-on project and was willing to come down and meet with the families.

He ended up bringing a more practical vision to their “idealized” plans, Carl says. The architect proposed a warehouse-like construction that could withstand a major earthquake – a house with a strong roof and walls atop a foundation of concrete and reinforced steel bar anchored into the mountain.

The 3,700-square-foot house took more than five years to build. It was constructed in three pods – a central building for common space, two side buildings for private family quarters, all of it integrated with about 1,500 square feet of redwood decking. The buildings are all wood, steel and glass.

When the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake struck, with its epicenter just three miles away, the house proved itself. “Anything inside the house that was loose became a flying object,” Carl recalls. But the house was solid. “We didn’t have any cracks in the foundation or in any of the over 100 windows.”

The families, each with three children, were just as strong. From 1978 to 1990, they shared meals, chores, expenses, even the challenges of adolescence. “It had its problems, of course,” Carl says. But everyone had enough trust and mutual affection that they were able to pull through, he says.

A few years into the experience, Larry and Vivian divorced, and Larry left the home. Carl says he became in some ways the “resident father” for all the kids.

Every morning the families had to get the kids up early to prepare lunches and figure out rides to school. These and other household tasks often fell to Kay and Vivian. Carl’s tasks included cutting and splitting wood for the three wood-burning stoves, the only source of heat.

Carl attributes the success of this adventure to Kay. “It would never have worked if I had been married to anyone else,” he says. “She was the glue that held everything together.”

The children grew up, went to college, married, and started families of their own. About a decade ago, Carl and Kay began contemplating a move down to town, possibly to a retirement community.

They enjoyed the mountain tranquility but started to feel somewhat isolated after both retired. And they figured they ought to “take full advantage of the opportunity” afforded by a retirement community while their health is still strong, says Carl, who is now a Senior Fellow at Santa Clara University while Kay is active in their church, where she does community outreach work and leads a women’s spirituality group. Carl also leads a men’s spirituality group.

The Terraces of Los Gatos turns out to be the ideal location – just a 15-minute drive from the mountain home, which they continue to enjoy with their children and grandchildren. The families return to the house for part of the summertime.

And The Terraces offers something more – another educational adventure for the two teachers. “We’re learning to adjust to a more social environment,” Kay says.

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