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The rebuilt “Idea House,” designed by Holly Freres and David Horning of JHL design. The driveway is permeable to encourage good drainage: crushed granite gravel is installed over a stabilization mat. James Hardie exterior siding is painted in Benjamin Moore ‘White Dove,’ with reclaimed wood used for the entry and garage.

The exterior was kept mostly the same, with wood siding throughout.

The building is wrapped in a skin of silvery grey western red cedar. There are no windows visible from the street. The front door is a simple, sliding panel of fiberglass sheeting.

The bach, which is rented as a vacation home when not being used by its owners, gives a range of spaces to escape to within its walls. The end of the house farthest from the road contains the secluded master bedroom with en suite, which has its own entrance and is separated by the covered deck. Each bedroom has a sheltered outdoor space with a translucent screen that acts as a kind of lightwell, offering total privacy while allowing light to permeate the interior. The height of the screens was lowered slightly to give a clear view of the silhouette of the nearby mountain. “You don’t want to be opening and closing curtains all the time,” says Lance Herbst. “We wanted it to be the kind of house you can walk around in after your swim and have a high level of privacy.”

One side of the building contains two simple bedrooms and a bathroom. The other, larger side houses the open-plan living area, kitchen, covered deck with fireplace, and additional bedroom. The deck-hallway that runs the length of the building is partially covered, but the decking boards and inset fiberglass door panels allow air and light to penetrate. The architects wanted to suggest that moving between the different living spaces involved a trip through nature, as it does in traditional camping.

A view of the home from the east side.

"When we started out, Casey wasn’t married and wasn’t dating anyone," says architect Arthur Furman. "So the original project brief was less about bedrooms and bathrooms, and more about the character of the home. Specifically, the shape. Casey had an image in his mind of a house he had photographed early in his career in a wooded area of Maine. The house was a basic shape—as one would draw as a child—just a box with a gabled roof." The home's simple gabled shape is emphasized by the use of burnished stucco on all sides.

The pine-and-steel outdoor dining table is from Hatch Workshop, while the benches were built by Clifton Craftwork and Design.

Studio retreat

At dawn

"Flexibility, resilience, and joy were essential ingredients,

The owners' love of Sea Ranch style inspired the architecture of their home, which surrounds a courtyard protecting three large redwoods.

The front of the property was intentionally made to have a small scale so that the towering redwood trees would be more visible to the neighborhood.

The new home quotes the forms and materials of the neighborhood, but remixes them in a more contemporary combination.

Neal and Inga Barber built a new home atop the existing foundation of their previous house in Kenmore, a suburb of Seattle, Washington.