Open to the blue waters and inexperienced coastal expanses of the better Seattle area, this suburban Pacific Northwest home ticks all of the packing containers as a eternally household house – there’s ample area, purposeful design, a connection to nature, a strong future-proofing plan, and versatile areas which can be able to adapt to its residents’ altering wants.
Step inside Rafael de Cárdenas’ new Seattle design
Its creator, New York-based designer and founding father of namesake studio Rafael de Cárdenas, explains: ‘The purchasers had lived in just a little home on this web site for 20 years. They liked it and by no means needed to depart. It’s solely about 20 minutes from downtown Seattle, however you may also swim within the lake, the character is superb. Its waterfront location and beautiful panorama design counsel a weekend retreat. In order that they determined to increase and remodel their current property into their eternally house.’
The designer labored carefully along with his purchasers – a cat- and dog-owning household of 4 – to create a brand new construct that changed the prevailing, drained and restrictive (by way of area and magnificence) home.
The design would incorporate the footprint of the unique construction on web site, and increase in direction of the adjoining plot, which the house owners acquired as they launched into their growth course of. The consequence now gently sprawls throughout the expanded web site, subtly oriented in direction of the lengthy waterfront vistas and wrapped in glazing, which brings the skin in at each flip. It principally unfolds on a single, floor degree, with the east wing containing the residing and leisure areas and the west one the extra non-public sleeping quarters. The youngsters’s bedrooms are on the a lot smaller first flooring, positioned simply above a casual household room and the mother and father’ major suite.
The transient, de Cárdenas recollects, described ‘a up to date home with calming areas that bleed the skin in. Rooms had a collection of particular capabilities. For instance, a wing off the japanese aspect of the home was a consumer directive: a room that capitalises on oceanfront views romanticising the Pacific Northwest’s wet climate whereas enhancing the sound of water on glass. Its operate? Ambiguous. Typically a eating room, generally a wellness area, and generally a celebration venue. We considerably casually began calling it the ‘rain room’ and it caught.’
A steady hall on the southern aspect of the plan, located ‘like a bar following the roughly straight waterfront edge’, is the property’s most important circulation area, marked by a skinny skylight operating alongside it. A barely noticeable kink of about 15 levels retains the glass aspect of the home in step with the shoreline, embracing the grounds, which had been landscaped by Randy Allworth and Nanda Patel of Allworth Design, and the horizon vistas past.
The doorway is centred on the view of a mature cypress tree on the opposite aspect of the property, seen by an open-plan residing area inside and the waterside’s glazed partitions. And whereas all this feels magnificently open to its suburban environment, the house’s goings-on are expertly hid for privateness by rows of extra cypress timber throughout the plot.
The south, street-facing aspect is basically over-mortared vintage cobble, with some cedar and bronze parts, whereas the north façade is basically glass with cedar decks.‘We needed the outside to be quiet and never heroic,’ says de Cárdenas. ‘The consumer, although dedicated to excellence, had a troublesome time responding to renderings. We needed to make bodily fashions, which is uncommon nowadays, and mocked up large-scale points of the mission excess of we ever had.’
Working alongside architects of document Conard Romano, constructing consultants King Building, and lighting designers LightPlan, de Cárdenas accomplished the mission after ten years of growth and constructing work to beautiful element.
The studio has designed additions and intensive inside schemes previously, however this scheme marks its first ‘ground-up mission’, notes de Cárdenas, including that that is additionally ‘virtually an invisible home, or a minimum of that was its purpose: design that’s meant to be as quiet as doable, together with interiors, furnishings, supplies and so forth. That’s an enormous departure from the remainder of our initiatives’.
rafaeldecardenas.com
This text seems within the August 2024 difficulty of Wallpaper*, out there to obtain free while you signal as much as our day by day e-newsletter, in print on newsstands from 4 July, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple Information +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* right this moment
Supply: Wallpaper