An Industrial Designer's House Blends Economy and Simplicity

"I’ve spent my whole life designing things," says Nick Oakley, who has worked for more than a decade as an industrial designer for Intel in Portland, Oregon, and, before that, Ideo in San Francisco. And yet his greatest design challenge—and opportunity—arose when he decided to build a house for himself. Oakley started by hiring Ben Waechter, a Portland architect whose work had caught his eye on a pair of home tours. "Ben’s work has a humility about it: a sense of purity and functionality, and a simple architectural gesture that made it stick in my head," he says.