Jai Kumaran and Lindsay Merkle wanted to go home. Not to the redwoods of California’s Santa Cruz Mountains, where Jai, cofounder and partner at the architecture firm West of West, grew up, or back to the pines of Mercer Island in Washington State, where Lindsay, who works at a telemedicine start-up, spent her childhood, but to a setting that felt just as familiar as the places where they were reared. So after moving from Los Angeles to Portland, Oregon, in 2016, they began a search for land outside the city where Jai could experiment with design ideas and where they could make a creative compound for themselves, their two vizsla dogs, and visiting friends and family.

After months of touring properties, Lindsay and Jai became enchanted with a 20-acre ridgetop parcel in Scappoose. It was badly neglected, however, and soon the realities of taking on their own ground-up construction project sank in. Here, they recount the years long road they took to erect their first structure, a prefabricated workshop and studio suite.

Finding the Right Site

Jai: We knew we wanted to escape the city, where we still have a condo and I have an office, but we needed to be close to an airport, because Lindsay travels for work, and I do too to an extent.

Lindsay: And we still wanted to have nights out at restaurants and concerts and friends nearby, so we basically took a string, put it on a map of Oregon, and made a diameter within 45 minutes of Portland in every direction.

Jai: Some of the properties we saw were in the bottom of a valley or in the forest, and while they were beautiful, it was that dark, drippy, mossy kind of thing, which wasn’t what we wanted. With this project, the big themes were light and air, and the property we found in Scappoose made them possible.

A Steep Road

Lindsay: We knew this was an ambitious project but didn’t know quite how ambitious until we started.

Jai: There were three existing structures that were in complete disrepair and had to be demolished. One was an animal barn, another was a pole barn, and the last was an old house with plywood siding and more than a dozen peacocks living inside. We had to figure out how to relocate them. The land had also been treated like a dump and required a lot of cleanup.

Lindsay: Some of it felt so out of our control. We were trying to find someone top our us a new concrete pad and driveway, and people would drive up here and seethe road—it’s an old logging road—and say, “Nope, not interested. It’s not possible.” I had to “catfish” construction people, telling them it was no big deal so that they’d come out.

A Building Rises

Jai: After a year of demolition and restoration, we started camping out here regularly and having bonfires with friends and getting a sense of the land. We said, “Okay, what is it that we want to do?”

Lindsay: We had planned on building a main house, but we’ve since pivoted and are thinking about doing multiple little cabins. To get something up quickly we built this workshop with a studio suite on top, which is basically phase one.

Jai: The structure is a steel kit-of-parts from an Oregon company, Web Steel Buildings Northwest, that I designed. It was kind of an experiment and in theory was faster and cheaper to build than doing something more traditionally. It looks like a farm building, so it has a connection to the rural landscape, but one of the custom elements is the set of marine-grade sheets of plywood for a soffit on the big eave. They’re like giant shingles.

Lindsay: I wanted it to have three things: a big window seat in the studio suite that looks out over the woods, because we both had one in our family homes growing up; an outdoor shower for rinsing off after working on the property; and a glass garage door in the shop for light and a view outside.

Party Time

Jai: Now that it’s finished, we use the shop for craft projects and woodworking and to store our motorcycles and other adventure gear, like snowboards and skis. There’s a zone for everything.

Lindsay: The first thing I bought for it was a pair of vintage Cerwin Vega speakers, and we have a disco ball that rises and lowers on an industrial winch. We wanted to have great parties with our friends here where you could be outside and barbecue but have covered space, too.

Jai: It’s so easy to have a bonfire outside and watch the stars that you can’t see from the city. We’ve already gotten so much enjoyment from having people come out and take a deep breath with us.

Project Credits:

Architect of Record: West of West / @west_of_west

Builder: Triad Construction

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