Fantasizing about your own private resortlike property, surrounded by lushly landscaped lawns, gardens and trees, and a pool and patio all to yourself? In this dream, is your pool indoors or outside? With 3907 Happy Valley Road, you don’t have to choose. This special home offers roomy grounds in Lafayette and features an outdoor pool designed to extend into the interior dining room. It’s on the market now for the first time in almost 60 years, asking $4.45 million.
In 1960, architect Walter Costa was commissioned to design 3907 Happy Valley Road. Costa worked for most of his career with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, or SOM, “one of the world’s leading architectural firms and designer of many of the most recognized skyscrapers and civic buildings of the postwar era,” according to an email from listing agent Ann Newton Cane of Golden Gate Sotheby’s International Realty. Eventually, Costa became a general partner at SOM. In his 2022 obituary in the East Bay Times, Costa is described as an architect who worked all over the country, as well as internationally at the U.S. embassy in Moscow. Costa also “served as a Lafayette City Councilman from 1972 to 1976, and served as Lafayette’s 6th Mayor in 1973,” to quote the East Bay Times.
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In the case of 3907 Happy Valley Road, Costa was creating a custom home: His client, Cane said, was “partially disabled,” which very likely explains some of the decisions Costa made in his building. For example, the home is one level and opens seamlessly to the front and back exterior areas. The home’s pool, sparkling like an agate inset in the patio’s white stone, was carefully integrated into the home’s interior. Now — along with the arched ceiling, the walls of glass that open to the courtyard and the marble floors — the dining room also features a pool. Over the next several decades, Costa’s unique modernist design captured lavish media attention and was featured in the Better Homes and Gardens and Sunset magazines, as well on HGTV.
In 1967, this home’s original owner sold it to the Coglizer family (the purchase price then was only $57,500), and the property has stayed in that family’s hands to the present day. In an email interview, David Coglizer, whose parents bought 3907 Happy Valley Road, spoke of his first impression of the home: “My parents purchased the home in 1967 when I was six years old,” Coglizer wrote. “What struck me even then was how different it felt from other houses. The architect, Walter Costa, filled the home with glass and designed it around gardens, courtyards, and, of course, the indoor-outdoor pool. Nearly every room has a view of the landscape.”
Today, all of those elements remain, but that doesn’t mean the Cogizer family didn’t make their own changes during their roughly six-decade tenure. “Over the years, my parents carefully expanded the property while respecting the original modernist design,” David said. The family enlarged the home’s gardens, added water features and outdoor seating areas, and brought what David described as “extensive” wrought-iron work to the three-quarter-acre lot. “Much of the wrought iron design was created by Napa designer Freeland Tanner and includes pergolas, fencing, and garden structures throughout the property,” he said…