A concrete framework establishes the structure and rhythm of Frame House, a residence in the Sonoma countryside. Rooted on a hillside above a forested canyon and vineyards, this structural grid maximizes the connection between the inside and out, allowing for natural light and direct access to the exterior from every room. The loggia, which wraps three sides of the house’s perimeter, shades living spaces and provides access to expansive views from the second level decks. The house is designed to confront the “new normal” reality of climate-change fueled wildfires in California. The property was ravaged by the Nuns Wildfire in 2017 and after the previous home suffered damage, the new home was to be armored with fire resistant materials. Concrete columns, shear walls, soffits, and metal clad windows are softened by the addition of wood clad panels which are added as a superficial and sa…

Octothorpe House is one of the first buildings constructed using cross-laminated timber produced in the United States. Sitting on the site of a forest lost to wildfire two decades ago, the home nods to the place’s history with ashen Shou Sugi Ban cedar board siding and the raw CLT finish of its interior. Formally, four intersecting shed-roofed bars divide the plan into public and private areas. The intersections of the bars form planting courtyards around the building—one fully enclosed at the building’s center and seven semi-enclosed at its perimeter. The narrowness of each bar and generous glazing on opposing walls create a light-filled interior that merges with the outside.

On top of a mountain in Kvitfjell, Norway is a regular grid of 45 wooden columns. The columns lift a 144sqm cabin 1.5m above the ground, allowing native grasses that sheep and cows graze on to grow below. The columns are clad with skigard, a long and narrow, quarter cut tree log that is traditionally laid out diagonally by Norwegian farmers as fencing. The roof is overgrown with the same native grasses found on the ground below and on century’s old Norwegian buildings. The cabin is accessed through a series of wide wooden steps that lead to a veranda which frames the view of a valley and river below. Internally, the wood cabin is divided along its length into four smaller spaces, each housed under a frustrum ceiling capped with a skylight. The spaces are scaled intimately but open visually and physically to the landscape below and a small grove of trees the cabin is nestled in.

At this compact Sonoma guesthouse, board-formed concrete sculpted into austere volumes carves into dry earth, suspending guest rooms over a plateau’s edge. The building is composed of three small volumes that step down with the changing grade, nesting into the site’s natural contours so that the mass of the building is softened into the hillside. Terracotta concrete blends with the rich, rusty colorations of the property’s rock to enhance the impression of its rootedness. A continuous, multi-gabled roof joins the private units into a coherent whole. Solid concrete walls and roof shield the interior from the sun during the harshest times of day. The roof’s oblique ridges direct views from within the house out to the remarkable hills beyond and shade the windows to protect from the intensity of the summer sun.

Troll Hus is a 3,300sf single-family residence in Norden, California driven both by the extreme environmental conditions found at a 6,800 foot elevation and a California sensibility of generous indoor-outdoor living. Based on the alpine chalet building type, the house is lifted on concrete legs to protect it from snow in excess of 800 inches a year. The building’s orientation shields it from prevailing winds while allowing living spaces to open onto glazed south-facing balconies, maximizing solar exposure in the winter and shading the interior in the summer. The main living space at the upper level has an open plan configuration below two vaulted ceilings capped with skylights, demarcating two smaller spaces more akin in scale to an alpine cabin. The building is clad in pine tar-treated wood—the same natural, robust cladding found on 1000 year old Norwegian barns—which allows Troll Hu…

A house for an architectural photographer and interior designer, this project conceptually functions as a container for their furniture and art collections and laboratory for their work. While the project was deep in the stages of redesign, a fire ravaged the home and forced a critical rethinking of the design goals. The proportions, scale, and exterior massing take cues from its gabled Victorian neighbors that step up the steep typical San Francisco streetscape. Inside, objects clad in textures, patterns, and materiality reflect the owners' collective creative spirit. The house starts at the bottom with a darker palette for the primary bedroom suite and garden space, and gradually moves up to a lighter and brighter palette on the entry level, and a bright white light and view catcher in the third story addition’s great room. A central curved and sculpted staircase allows light from t…

To create a small guesthouse and rental unit on a steep hillside property in Marin County, we repurposed the foundation from an old garage and built an Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) on its footprint. The building’s angled roofline mirrors the slope of the site and gives clerestory window light above the cabinetry wall, while a playful flip in the roof provides a punched window from the loft viewing the trees. Cement board was used to provide a fire resistant cladding in the wooded hillside, and also for ease of maintenance. Due to the steep hillside, a deck takes advantage of the California climate, essentially doubling the usable area. Designing for the utmost effective square feet, flexible programming was necessary: a rolling kitchen island can be moved in or outside when space or utility is needed, and a murphy bed folds down at night for sleeping. The loft space, with a window ou…

Mylla is a small 84 square meter (940 square foot) cabin located in a towering pine forest outside of Oslo. Designed as a retreat for a geologist and his family, the building sits firmly on a hilltop and is formed by the forces of the landscape around it. Though planning regulations required a gable roof, Mylla splits the gable in half to create four shed roofs that radiate in a pinwheel configuration. Two sheltered outdoor spaces are created which are protected from the wind and from snow shed. The exterior is clad simply with untreated heart pine planks, which register the seasons as it greys and weathers with time. The compact interior, finished in plywood and unified with a continuous roof canopy, can house up to ten people across three dedicated bedrooms and two full bathrooms. Custom plywood furniture, including bed frames, bunk beds, couch, dining table, benches, and shelves ar…

Engaging the steep topography at this Sonoma site began as a practical exercise to address access and led to a more holistic design approach for of the residence itself. The lower level at this two-story house carves out a space in the hillside to allow for a complete firetruck turn-around at the top of the driveway, creating a void under the main level of the house. A fanning plan wraps the horizontal mass around a central focal point and directs the upper level in a very extroverted fashion back out to the landscape. Panelized corten cladding also ties the exterior finish back to the ground with its strong connection to the rust-colored dirt on-site.

This ski cabin for a family of four is Mork Ulnes Architect’s second project in Kvitfjell, Norway. With the ambition to accommodate three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a spacious living area, and a two-car carport on a site with relatively little flat area, the siting of the building’s mass becomes the design driver. To make it nimble and adaptable to the site, the cabin’s mass was broken into two, slim, gabled volumes. These two volumes are angled to perch along the contours of the site’s slope and step down with the grade. The interplay of the volumes also allows maximum access to natural light throughout the plan and invites to bleed into the spaces between the two building wings, creating a continuous indoor-outdoor connection throughout the house.

At a junction of cross country and downhill ski trails on the top of Varden in Kvitfjell, sits the Trippel Hytte. The word Varden in Norwegian means a stack or collection of stones at the top of a mountain or hill which are used to mark a hilltop or walking path. Designed for a family of five avid skiers, this collection of three small cabins is skewed to orient each structure towards views of high mountain tops in the distance. The staggered agglomeration of the three cabin volumes references the agricultural buildings in the region that often built over generations as needs and means dictate. Also in reference to the regional building tradition, wooden roof gutters project from the edges of the building to move the water away from the wood siding. The building’s three smaller cabins contain a great room, three bedrooms, a loft playroom and extra sleeping space, a bathroom with sauna…

This project site offers a prized vantage point onto three locally celebrated landscapes: “Eagle Rock,” a striking mountain ridge and a valley of vineyards below. Each oriented toward one of the landscapes beyond, the plan’s three prongs extend precisely in between the existing trees to carefully preserve each oak tree. The house was also constructed on steel stilts to avoid severing tree roots. To cut costs and minimize waste, the building was designed according to standard–sized, off–the–shelf sheet materials. This strategy was essential to completing the building within a tiny budget.

Incorporating expansive, generous space into this 1907 San Francisco Victorian’s attic required significant volumetric intervention to produce continuity in an otherwise traditionally segmented home. The gabled attic level is lightly divided into bedrooms by a series of incomplete partition walls. Around the solid walls, a wood and glass framework completes the delineation of space, acoustically sealing-off the separate rooms. The open framework allows total visibility across the house’s length, creating spaciousness within this tight plan. A double-height void is cut into the center of the plan for a new stair atrium that operates as the organizational and spatial hub of the house, linking the newly habitable attic to the existing living level. Where the atrium bisects the attic level, the attic’s wood framework becomes a graphic echo of the original roofline within the new building …

Meier Road is a complex of structures that began with the salvaging of a derelict wooden barn on a rural property in Sebastopol, California. The main structure is a 2500sf artist’s studio, office, and storage building that is clad in barn wood though inverts the pitched-roof form of the original. The inverted pitch roof creates sweeping double height spaces for art production and storage, while providing natural ventilation, natural light, and views out toward the property. A 720 sf concrete kitchen and dining space grows out from the studio. Nicknamed the “Amoeba,” it reaches toward the landscape and literally captures it to create a lush interior garden that softly separates the kitchen from the dining area. The roof is an exposed wood, scissor-beam roof construction with a large, diffuse skylight that brings light into the center of the building for people and plants. Though its fo…

This renovation represents unconventional materials’ capacity to elevate a project otherwise constricted by a tiny budget and planning scrutiny. With an imperative to create an impact on the exterior but remain within the city’s preservation and zoning requirements, a matte black cladding, typically used on skateboarding ramps, wraps the house’s existing two-levels. The residence’s social functions are relocated into a vertical penthouse addition with sweeping views. A hand-drilled, operable steel screen doubles as an awning and diffuses light to imbue the penthouse with a playful atmosphere. The same hills that poise the residence to have panoramic views also create a notably steep backyard. This sectional condition is celebrated as it enables a connection directly from the third floor to the back garden via a steel catwalk.

At one time the billiards-room of an Oslo mansion, this 2-storey apartment now functions as a residence for a young family. Originally built in 1899 and converted to apartments in the 1930’s, this renovation transforms the space to align with the needs of the client’s contemporary lifestyle. Existing walls were demolished and reconfigured to create a generous open kitchen and living area, while skylights and windows placed in the upper level partition walls allow light to filter through the rooms uninterrupted. As a counter to the harsh Scandinavian winters, the interior is painted white as a means to maximize reflected light into the residence.

This 19th century flat in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury neighborhood had been extensively remodeled in the 1960’s, resulting in an eclectic mix of Victorian details and quirky California Hippie interventions. The 2008 renovation celebrated this unique combination, while incorporating more natural light and enhancing the flow of space to better suit contemporary life. A double story space forms the heart of the residence and connects the two levels. A solid, butcher-block stairway and bridge connect the public living space on the entry floor to the more private sleeping quarters on the upper level. Roof dormers were added to accommodate a bathroom and offer sweeping views of the city. The stair and bridge were built by recycling floorboards from the existing attic floor and contribute to the ethos of this former hippie flat. A hand-made wooden longboard-like swing hangs from the bridg…

These factory-built mini houses were designed to fill a market-void in small, contemporary, and flexible-use accessory structures. Cabanas come in standard 10x10, 10x12, 10x16 and 12x25 configurations. The modular, pre-fabricated design allows multiple units to be connected together in order to create expanded floor plans ranging from 100 to 1,000+ square feet. Modern Cabana is a testament to the idea that contemporary pre-fab, sustainable design is compatible with affordability, ease of construction, and good design (cheap/fast/good). Over 100 cabanas have been built at the San Francisco factory and installed around the United States.

The cabin is situated in a clearing in the forest, positioning itself in between the trees. The volume is supported by columns to spare the ground and adjust to the sloping landscape of the site. A large rock serves as a natural starting point for the bridge leading to the entrance of the cabin. The bridge continues between the trees, creating a place to experience the forest at a higher elevation. The design of the cabin is inspired by local traditional building practices, particularly drawing inspiration from storehouses (stabbur) and lofts. Exterior walls, doors, and windows are planned in wood, treated with "tjære" to create the dark silhouette of the cabin in the deep forest. When the forest is green, the cabin blends in among the trees. During winter the cabin, along with the dark tree trunks, stands as a contrast to the white snow. The inside is planned in light wood creating a…

Situated at an elevation of over 6000’ (1800 m), Staggered Cabin deploys shed-roofed volumes to integrate onto a sloping site where South Lake Tahoe meets the foot of the mountains beyond. As the dark stained cedar-clad volumes shift and step down the alpine slope, they create compact exterior courtyards that celebrate some of the small site’s natural resources: boulders, massive Jeffrey Pines, and a level patch of ground that enjoys abundant sunlight. Inside, the 1400 square foot cabin efficiently distributes sleeping quarters about a central living and dining space that opens to the outdoors on either side. Finished in plywood, the cabin takes advantage of its steeply pitched shed-roof geometry to capture additional mezzanine spaces, maximizing functionality while maintaining a gentle approach to the site. Large openings frame views up into the trees or out onto the immediate contex…

The snow depth at Serene Lakes, at an elevation of over 6900’ (2060 m), can exceed 800 inches per season. To allow for the primary rooms of the home to enjoy natural light throughout the year, the main living space and bedrooms are raised on a concrete base which serves the dual functions of sheltered carport and ski room / mudroom entryway. Above, a modern chalet clad in light wood paneling contains three bedrooms, 2 baths, a kitchen, dining and living area, as well as a sleeping loft for overflow guests and storage. While the house is split vertically with its materiality -concrete at the base to protect from deep snow and wood above to reflect alpine heritage - it is also split horizontally with two volumes shifted to create a single ridgeline made of two shed roofs. A south facing deck provides summer access to the California indoor- outdoor lifestyle and enjoys a treehouse like p…

Located down a short path from the Kailua beach on the eastern shore of Oahu, this house has peekaboo views of the Pacific Ocean and the Mokulua Islands off Lanikai. Despite its proximity to the beach, the surrounding neighborhood is fairly dense, which created a desire to focus the house inward to the lush jungle landscape and celebrate the island mana of Hawaii. The house, a simple two story bar structure with a central stair leading from the main living area to the bedrooms, is adjoined by a grass-roofed lanai structure. At the center of the lanai and directly adjacent to the living space is a linear pool. The roof of the lanai opens in a half-circular void to bring sun and warmth to the pool while also providing a respite from the Hawaiian sun and frequent tropical rains. The lanai is perched upon four separate volumes containing an outdoor bathroom, office, outdoor kitchen, and a…

Located in an old residential neighbourhood in Toronto, Split Brick House addresses the spatial needs of a family of four within an efficient mass that respects the character of its built context- The home is split-level in order to satisfy fairly complex local planning and buildings department regulations, while severe Toronto winters and limited access to sunlight guide its formal response to the environment. The buildings mass steps back in response to the path of the sun, maximising access to sunlight in the winter. At the centre of the home, a generous light well brightens the interior throughout the year.

The parameters guiding the design of the Volcano House charged the project with particular sensitivities, namely: The need to protect the site’s natural Ohi’a forest, the functional demands of living off-the-grid, and the desire to promote the health and wellness of the occupants and surrounding community. As one of the homeowners has a vocation in Ayurvedic food, medicinal herbology, and healing, several wellness spaces are incorporated into the design. These include a meditation room, a sauna, and an integrated greenhouse on the second story which will be used to provide food and herbs for daily cooking and local community programs. Along with a proposed outdoor classroom pavilion, these spaces are intended as both healing bases for the owners and resources for the larger wellness community. Employing vernacular construction methods was essential in mitigating the building’s …