About five and a half miles southeast of downtown Portland, Oregon, in the Errol Heights neighborhood, the Springwater Trail Residence faces a greenbelt with a wetland that provides regular wildlife sightings for the home’s owner, Mariam. “I’ve seen an eagle come right up over me with a fish in its talons,” she says. “From my bed, I can look out the window and know where the eagle’s nest is. I sometimes say, ‘There’s the eagle. I can get up now.’”

Each day when she wakes, Mariam is immersed in nature without being too far from an urban center. But to build a home with a front-row seat to the outdoors, Portland and Bozeman-based Minarik Architecture had to come up with a design that would work on heretofore undeveloped land: The site was unstable, there were rigid environmental requirements, and Mariam wanted something that could get as close to going off-grid as possible. Essentially, it meant that Minarik had to economize in terms of space, materials, and energy usage.

First, the design had to overcome the unstable site. “We are sitting on thirty feet of undocumented fill, just concrete and rubble from when they built the rest of this development,” says architect Doug Minarik. “It was just horrible for building,” he adds, laughing. After the site had been excavated and graded, Minarik installed 30 micropiles to provide a sturdy foundation for the home, which accounted for about one-eighth of the entire $820,000 budget.

$45,000 Micropiles	$18,000 Pervious Driveway Pavement	$12,000 Appliances
$23,000 Site Excavation & Grading	$4,000 Photovoltaic Solar Panels	$8,700 Automatic Fire Protection Sprinklers
$23,000 Concrete Grade Beams	$10,000 Plumbing & Fixtures	$19,200 High-Efficiency Heat Pump
$10,000 Rainwater Planter	$27,300 Concrete Slabs & Flooring	$42,300 Windows & Doors
$23,400 Roofing	$31,400 Rain-Screen Siding	$16,500 Insulation
$33,000 Cabinets	$50,000 Framing	$423,200 Miscellaneous
Grand Total: $820,000

Because micropiles aren’t cheap, Minarik designed a footprint for the home that is “super tidy,” utilizing the site’s area to its utmost. Mariam chipped in with inspiration from the Louis Kahn–designed Fisher House in Hartboro, Pennsylvania, a home comprising two interlocking cubes tilting away from each other. “That was the idea: to kind of front the city grid at the street and then turn and see this landscape,” Minarik says. “It’s just one simple move, and everything else followed suit.”

To make the most of that concept, Minarik created multifunctional interior spaces that span a total of 1,947 square feet. In one example, between the living room and bedroom is a combination TV room, guest room, and hallway with a tiny, ten-square-foot sewing nook for Mariam. In another, the upstairs hallway beside the primary suite features a window seat, with a view looking out to the wetlands. The home’s communal spaces—the dining and living areas, and the kitchen—are combined in a single volume facing the wetlands and woods.

To meet Mariam’s desire for an off-grid design, and to address the site’s special needs, the house had to prioritize sustainability. Since the home borders a wetland on a sloping plot of land, no stormwater could leave the site, because it would hasten the erosion of the hillside. Instead, all rain is collected and channeled by an adjacent bioswale. To stay within budget, the design does not include a gray-water bladder or tank, but it does reserve a space underneath the house for whenever Mariam wants to add one.

Although the home cost more to build than the area’s average, its day-to-day expenses are minimized by its off-grid capabilities. An installed Tesla battery provides about two-thirds of Mariam’s electricity needs for the better part of the year, and during the summer, she’s completely covered. The battery can also store energy for later use, such as hours of the day or evening when electricity rates are higher, or when there are power outages. As a backup, or should there be an emergency, a gas stove converted to use propane provides another way to cook. The kitchen’s radiant-heated concrete floors, and a wood stove, keep the home cozy.

From the quartz countertops, to the walnut cabinetry, to the highly efficient wood stove, Mariam saved money by “buying floor samples, building relationships with local people, and working with them to build this house,” she says. “It’s actually walnut facing over plywood-core cabinetry.” Similarly, the wall in the primary bathroom that looks like marble is actually ceramic. “There’s a lot of little subtle budget things like that,” Minarik says.

From the moment she moved into the house, Mariam felt like she was coming home. That’s partly because of her past, and partly due to the unusually collaborative process between architect and client that started with a mutual love of drawing. “As a former medical illustrator, she really resonated with the hand-sketching we use early-on, and exchanging ideas back and forth together,” Minarik recalls. Growing up, Mariam’s father was a builder who constructed their family house. As an adult, her first home was an off-grid contemporary tucked away in the woods.

The home’s other volume—the one adjacent to the street—includes a garage with an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) above. It features its own entrance off the driveway, a staircase hidden by slatted wood that rises to meet the gable roofline. “The city has transparency requirements for fronting the street,” Minarik explains, “and we were able to satisfy that with the gaps between the wood. I love how the light and shadows are always changing, and how at night it just glows.”

More Budget Breakdown:

An Architect Couple Build a Net-Zero Home and Studio for $250 Per Square Foot

A Shipping Container Is Transformed Into an Off-Grid Tiny Home for $23K

Project Credits:

Architect of Record: Minarik Architecture / @minarik_architecture

Builder: W.A. Hughes Construction, Inc.

Structural Engineer: Munzing Structural Engineering / @munzingstructuralengineering

Landscape and Stormwater Design: Lando and Associates, Landscape Architecture