Mid-Century Modern

How do architecture and landscape connect with one another? The project’s architecture is a sleek, rational mid-century modern residence. It celebrates a connection with the car. It espouses the idea of modernity as lifestyle. With an open, airy quality, it rests on the ground lightly. Here modernity presents an opportunity for landscape to be an opposing quality – an earthy, grounded counterbalance. From this dynamic relationship, the clients’ perspective on lifestyle is expanded.

01

With seamless ease and efficiency car and house are connected. Here at the entry, the structure has a recessive quality. The low-slung shed roof is anchored by the Doug Fir and the residence screened by Vine Maples creating privacy.

02

Bark, fern, rock and paving linked together near the car door at the carport. The closeness of tree to architecture, its coarse trunk emerging from the ground plane, was the clue to a relationship then developed throughout the project.

03

By cutting apart and creating an opening, a path for the visitor on foot became an opportunity to explore the ground plane still further.

04

By design, the lightweight canopy and carport acknowledges the trunk of the Doug Fir and with it, its grounding presence. In this shady introverted space, with intimate sightlines, lush panels of ground covers mimic the native forest floor.

05

Of boulders and bronze. Dissecting materials with surgical precision, the Oblique Path creates a visceral connection with the surface. The cut and honed granite boulders and bronze ‘razor edges’ hold back and disrupt the flow of ground covers.

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At the house, the path bridges the Wet Rock and pool. Plant life luxuriates by the wet ‘seep’. A deep return to the paving edge imparts weight. A pocket view through the house leads the eye to mountain views.

07

Plush growth of moss and liverworts are sustained by the slow flow of water at the Wet Rock. As the tree connects ‘nature’ to the carport, so the Wet Rock creates an engagement with ‘nature’ at the residence’s entry.

09

In strong contrast to the shaded plantings at the entry, sun-loving aromatics lap up against the stone sitting wall at the top step of the granite path. The Sun Terrace is visible beyond.

08

Out in the open. From its origin at the carport, the pitch of the shed roof grows, facilitating expansive sightlines to mountain views from the living spaces. A granite path connects the lower level to the house and Sun Terrace.

10

Materials mingle on the Sun Terrace. Here extensive window walls open directly to the terrace. With streamlined efficiency, external spaces can mirror the internal spaces within.

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A terrace with a certain swing. With a reference to ease of living, the Day Bed and the Fire Rock sound a ‘cool’ note to this reinterpreted take on ‘50’s modern’.

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A lively interplay of concrete paving, granite, stainless steel, hardwood and plantings come together on the Sun Terrace to form the Day Bed. Built to withstand all seasons, in the summer Donghia exterior fabric cushions add plushness.

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Asleep, not extinct, a dormant volcano can add to any project. With Mount Rainier for eye-popping context, native and non-native plants were massed for an easy harmony, durability and extended interest.

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Living with a mid-century modern. Window walls expand to celebrate views both from the inside to out, but here at sunset, to within. On a summer’s evening a ‘camp fire’ experience is made possible in front of the volcano.