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Englishman Bay Retreat resides on a plot of land next door to the homeowner’s parents’ property; he remembers traversing it as a child to get to the pebbled beach. Clad in hardy local hemlock and raised on galvanized steel piers with board-formed concrete wrapping the ground floor’s mechanical systems, the residence is designed to endure through the ages.

Matt (a solutions engineer) and Leah (a medical writer) Ray met at the University of Texas Austin—coincidentally the same school where architects José Minguell and Laura McQuary met years earlier.

The sash-style windows are from Sierra Pacific, with a ‘Paramount’ sofa and ottoman by Blu Dot tucked underneath.

"They wanted a home where they could follow the weather, experiencing and doing activities on the property throughout the seasons—during the wet cold seasons, on the inside, and during the warm, dry seasons, out of doors,

When concrete trucks couldn't reach the addition site, the team switched to a pier-and-beam construction method with AAC [autoclaved aerated concrete] floor panels.

The house floats out over the hillside, minimizing its impact on the landscape, while taking advantage of surrounding views. The design, which places the primary living spaces on the upper floor, leaves flexibility to add an additional bedroom underneath in the future.

Twilight

Beside the pool is a multi-use guest house that can accomodate visitors with a movable wall of bookshelves deliniating the space, or become one large office or yoga/exercise studio.

The home is entered from a small porch on the lower level, just to the right of a carport created by the steel-reinforced cantilevering form. The lower level is nestled into the hillside.