Monte Sereno

AESTHETICS AND FIRE: ACRE AT A MONTE SERENO RESIDENCE

Project Overview

Monte Sereno sits in the wooded hills above the South Bay, a small Santa Clara County town next door to Los Gatos, where the architecture leans contemporary and wildfire is part of the planning conversation. For a new residence on Eaton Lane, architect Bess Wiersema, AIA, associate principal and owner at Studio 3 Design, and general contractor Jeff Juncker of Juncker Restoration & Remodel turned to ACRE for the exterior. The product shows up on the siding, the beam wraps, the post wraps, and the porch floor, one material running through the whole envelope.

Challenge

Bess knew she wanted a wood look on the house, and she was equally clear on what she wasn’t going to settle for. Painted-only finishes were out. So was anything that couldn’t meet the fire safety the team wanted on a hillside site, or hold its appearance
over time.
“It was always a struggle to find something that met the fire safety we wanted, the longevity we wanted, that looked more natural and didn’t just have only painted finishes available to it,” Bess said. The brief stacked three requirements that rarely show up together: a natural wood read, real fire performance, and enough finish range to stay out of paint-only territory.

Solution: ACRE By Modern Mill

Bess found ACRE on Instagram in what she calls her “midnight meetings with myself.” A few product samples from Modern Mill landed in the studio, and the case made itself: “Immediately in love with the product. It looked great. Even better in real life than in product samples.”

ACRE was specified for the exterior siding, then carried through the beam wraps, post wraps, and the porch floor. Tree-free, stainable, and fully compliant with Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) fire standards, the framework that requires fire-resistant materials and design in California’s wildfire zones, ACRE is made from upcycled rice hulls, an agricultural byproduct that would otherwise be burned or sent to landfills. It mills, cuts, and finishes like premium wood while resisting the moisture, weather, and rot that traditional wood puts on a maintenance schedule from day one.

The exterior runs in a vertical shiplap milled in three widths, 1×6, 1×8, and 1×10, laid in a random pattern Bess designed across the elevations. The boards are stained in ACRE’s Amory finish, a dark warm tone that lets the texture do the work and reads as natural wood from any distance.

Jeff put a dedicated siding crew on the ACRE work, and the random layout took a beat. “What Bess did here with the random layouts was a little troubling at first with the guys, but we got into a rhythm,” Jeff said. “The nice long lengths gave us a lot of versatility, and with the beam wraps and everything, the application went really smooth. It’s a great product. I would definitely recommend it.”

For Bess, the sustainability story landed as a bonus, not the pitch. The honest summary, in her words: “The sustainability was a nice perk, but honestly, the drive was aesthetics and fire.”
— Bess Wiersema, Aia, Studio 3 Design

The Eaton Lane residence adds another Bay Area address to ACRE’s growing presence on the West Coast, where the climate and the code both reward materials that look like wood, last like composite, and hit fire performance without compromise. For Bess and Jeff, the case was clean: one product that answered the brief on aesthetics, on fire, and on the build itself, from the siding right down to the porch floor.