Residential · Completed 2023
Coastal Forest Retreat
Olympic Peninsula, WA
The facts
- Location
- Olympic Peninsula, WA
- Completed
- 2023
- Programme
- Two-bedroom house, off grid
- Size
- 1,850 SF
- Structure
- Timber frame on nine helical piles; cedar siding milled on site; single-plane standing-seam roof
01 · The site
Forty miles from the nearest grid connection.
Eleven acres of second-growth cedar on a slope above a creek, with no grid connection and no prospect of one. Power is photovoltaic with a propane generator behind it and water comes from a drilled well, so everything the house does has to fit inside those two numbers.
The slope is why it stands on helical piles rather than a foundation. A poured footing meant an excavator, a road for the excavator, and eleven trees. Nine piles went in over two days with a machine that fits between the trunks, and the deck cantilevers eleven feet past the last of them.
02 · The materials
Cedar, and a roof that collects.
Timber frame, cedar siding milled from the property’s own windthrow, and a standing-seam roof pitched one way so the whole area drains into a single 3,000-gallon cistern. Triple glazing, because the heating budget is a battery.
There is no air conditioning and no mechanical cooling of any kind. The house is eighteen feet deep, it cross-ventilates on both floors, and it sits under trees.
Off grid is not a feature of this house. It is the constraint every other decision was made inside.
03 · The decisions we’d defend
Four choices a client could argue with.
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01
Helical piles, not footings
A poured foundation needed an access road and eleven trees. The piles needed two days and a machine that fits between the trunks.
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02
One roof plane
Two planes and a valley would have halved the collection area and added the one detail on a wet coast that eventually always leaks.
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03
Eighteen feet deep
Anything deeper needs mechanical ventilation, and mechanical ventilation wants the battery the heating already wants. Depth was the cheapest thing to spend.
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04
Siding milled on site
Three cedars came down in the 2021 windstorm and were milled where they fell. It is not a gesture; it is four thousand board feet that did not need a ferry.
