Splendour in the Trees

by Linda Barnard / Photos by Ema Peter

Wrapped in dark bronze metal and angled cedar slats, this custom home in Sooke features striking architectural details and was designed to frame the stunning views of the surrounding rainforest.

The building site rises to a rocky clearing, then drops sharply to the ocean. Anyone fixated on having a house on the water here would be disappointed. That wasn’t the case with this client. The ocean was accessible, she said. She just had to walk down to it.

“She was very much part of the process,” says Ray of the homeowner, who prefers not to be named. “She moved there early and was at all the site meetings we had. She was the perfect client.”

To get a feel for how the house should be situated, the design team spent a night and two days camping there. It’s something Campos learned when building his first commission in Mexico.

“If your goal is to be sensitive to the land and to integrate into it and to get the most out of it, then spending time there is one of the biggest things,” he says.

He placed the house on the clearing at the top of the land.

The home’s placement on the wooded lot was finalized after the design team from Campos Studio spent a couple nights camping on the property. They added a modest outbuilding for the client to store firewood.

A central column mimics the forest outside. The flash of red where it attaches to the beam is designed to “draw attention to this one moment,” says Campos. The hemlock slat ceiling feels like looking up into the forest canopy.

The Adjacent Possible

Asked what challenges he and Ray faced in designing the home, Campos replies he doesn’t use the word.

“We really see them as opportunities,” he says. “These so-called challenges are the things that bring an opportunity to do something. We like to talk about this thing called the adjacent possible,” Campos adds. “What’s possible that’s adjacent to what you currently see, but you can’t see it at the beginning?”

Ray joined the firm in 2015, about a year into the project. She says it was important to make the most of all the opportunities the site had for views, and the forest experience.

Each window presents a different glimpse of the ocean, mountains, mossy rocks and forest. The goal was for the client to have changing experiences inside, even if she was only walking a few feet.

The house is low maintenance. There are no gutters, skylights or flat roof areas. The cedar exterior is untreated and will weather to a beautiful silver.

Radiant floor heating keeps the house warm, with a wood stove for ambiance and colder days.

The two-bedroom interior flows from a central ridge beam, with the guest bedroom and master bedroom at opposite ends of the house for privacy.

A single column, the same size as a tree just outside the home’s entrance, meets the interior roof beam. A bright flash of rusty red at the top seems to say, “Look here.”

To underscore the tree’s importance, the roofline is cut out, framing it.

Angled thin slats climb up walls and even across the ceiling in some rooms, making the light-filled spaces feel like secluded areas in stands of trees. Rich red-brown sapele wood is used for millwork. Some walls and windows tilt.

“Although it’s open plan, the different variants of the roof and the walls tilting on an axis allows the proportions of these rooms to be diverse and have these different experiences,” says Ray.

The designers wanted the building to change over time, so the cedar exterior was left untreated. The wood will age to a rich silver-grey.

A building element diagram shows the shape of the house, including the dark bronze-coloured metal exterior. Akin to a turtle’s shell, it’s low maintenance, making it beautiful and practical, says principal designer Javier Campos. A drawing shows how the house is positioned around a rocky knoll at the heart of the site.

A Work of Art

An engineered hanger system allows the walls to drop from the roof, rather than starting at the ground and rising up, explains Sooke-based builder Paul Clarkston of Clarkston Construction, who spent 16 months building the house. “It’s like they’re falling away from the building,” he says.

Clarkston says every inch of the home was highly detailed. He echoes the Campos team’s observation that this was a dream client, someone with good taste and a discerning eye who knew what she wanted and was uncompromising in seeing her vision become reality.“

There are 27 elevations on the house,” says Clarkston. A box, for example, has four elevations, or sides. It’s extraordinary to have so much detail on such a small dwelling, he says. “When you are in the space, you appreciate it for being a work of art.”

About six months after the client moved in, Campos called to see how she was doing. She was opening a bottle of champagne.

What’s the occasion, he asked?

“She said, ‘Oh, silly. I’m celebrating my house. Every month or so I buy a bottle of champagne and I open it, because I love my house so much.”