back yard

“From anywhere in the house, you have a sense of the outdoors,” says Melonie, “and yet it’s very private.” Ikegami agrees. “The building was really about the landscape—it can dissolve into the background,” he says. In the master bedroom, Japanese Tansu chests from the couple’s previous home flank a Duxiana bed. The full-height windows and swing door are from Western Window Systems.

Featuring more than 100 species, the garden is brimming with bird and insect attractants. “Surya’s first word was the Hindi word for bird,” says Surya’s father, Ali, “and it’s amazing to see all the birds that are coming through here now that are attracted to certain plants.”

The garden is fed by a laundry-to-landscape graywater system that gently releases water into the soil through wood-chip mulch basins. “They operate as a sort of living filter, soaking up the graywater and slowing its flow into the landscape,” says installer Leigh Jerrard of Greywater Corps, who holds workshops to teach homeowners how to set up the low-tech system themselves. Impurities are broken down through microbial action, and eventually the mulch becomes a rich compost.

A gravel trail winds through greenery into the entryway of the home, reinforcing the parklike nature of the site.

In place of a lawn, Inge Jabra Landscapes specified pavers surrounded by creeping thyme, which can be walked on without being destroyed.

Spruce and pine cladding echo the verticality of the tree trunks surrounding the cabins.

The back garden's patio features sliced concrete cylinders that were a byproduct of the facade.