Woodside halts work at mansion

The top two floors of the three-story, 7,425-square-foot mansion at 360 Mountain Home Road in Woodside are reported to be resting on steel beams above a large empty space where the foundation, basement and first floor used to be. It's been an active construction site for months, but now its future, including the lowering of those upper floors onto new first-floor framing, is uncertain.

As of July 3, the site was posted with a stop-work notice from the town. The Planning Commission had approved the project in November 2013 as a remodel. But, alerted by staff about the missing floors, the commission met on July 2 to discuss whether actions at the site were consistent with what had been approved.

The mansion made news in November 2012 when it was sold for $117.5 million, a new U.S. record for a single-family home, according to news reports at the time. Staff reports list the owner of the 8.74-acre property as SV Projects LLC.

After a lengthy public hearing that included testimony from construction managers, the commission voted 6-1 to continue the matter to a date uncertain and referred it to the planning director, who then issued the stop-work order. Commissioner Elizabeth Hobson dissented.

Included in the vote was a recommendation to send the project back to the Architectural and Site Review Board, essentially back to square one. The remodel, according to some commissioners, had evolved into a demolition.

Planning Director Jackie Young told the Almanac that the original resolution will be returning to the Planning Commission along with an "alternate resolution of denial" based on the July 2 discussion.

More massive

Original plans called for replacing the white wooden siding on the main house with beige stone siding, installing roofs of gray slate, and adding oval windows in various locations. An upper-floor balcony would be enclosed under a slate dome.

Those are the plans being implemented, Noel Manerud of the Mill Valley firm Van Acker Construction told the commission. The missing first floor reflects the need to strengthen the framing, as does the missing foundation, he said.

Such insights came through "discovery" as the project advanced, Mr. Manerud said. The commission caught the project at a "moment in time," he said. "We needed to temporarily remove that framing which was in place on the main level to ... restore it, augment it. ... We're effectively caught mid-stream between that temporary removal and installation of shoring (to support the stone walls)."

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Woodside halts work at mansion