Architecture
that endures

A weekend cabin for a family from San Francisco — two parents, two young children, a dog, and a love of entertaining in the mountains. The brief asked for a building that could hold a full house of guests, open completely to the Sierra Nevada views, and disappear into the forest when it needed to.

The answer is a fire-resistant steel skin embedded with a pearlescent coating that shifts with the light and season. In summer it takes the colour of the surrounding conifers — a deep, iridescent green that makes the building nearly invisible. At dusk it reflects the blue and pink of the sky through band windows that wrap the full circumference of the upper volume. Under heavy snow, the roof holds the drift and the building reads only as a warm glow through the trees.

The structure is mass ply — a choice that enables the large, column-free openings the views demand while providing inherent thermal mass and acoustic warmth. The fire-resistant steel cladding achieves a four-hour fire rating, a specification shaped by fourteen years of building in California's wildfire terrain.

The lower level opens to a stone-paved pool terrace at the forest edge, sheltered beneath the overhang of the upper volume. A place to come back to after a day in the snow.

Hidden within a dense canopy of araucaria, fern, and tropical forest above Waimea, The Forest House barely announces itself. A complete reorganisation — five bedrooms, reimagined kitchen, new bathrooms, outdoor kitchen, and a full landscape that deepened the relationship between house and forest.

Completed 2025. Two Hawaii houses, one year apart — Puuki open to the mountain; The Forest House consumed by its canopy. The same attention, two entirely different answers.

A house that disappears into its ridge. Corrugated steel outside. Birch plywood within. Double-height glazing dissolving the line between interior and canopy. The kitchen anchored by a slot window onto living ivy.

As featured in Architectural Digest, Dwell, GA Publishers Tokyo

A 1960s kit home above Waimea, Mauna Kea on the horizon. Four bedrooms, reimagined kitchen, new bathrooms, outdoor kitchen in lava rock. Reclaimed timber, cast concrete, a gallery wall grown from years of living. This house was full of a life. The work was to honour that.

As featured in Dwell Magazine

A scaffolding cathedral rising from the Rutherford valley floor. An ancient olive tree at its centre. By day transparent; by night, illuminated and sacred. An architecture that asks whether a building needs walls to hold meaning.

Two monumental V-shaped translucent glass walls converging on a timber portal. A formal olive grove approach, cascading limestone water garden, Mayacamas mountains beyond.

Two volumes, two materials, one hillside. A dark concrete base reads as an extension of the slope. Above it, vertical Douglas fir fins. The building does not interrupt the landscape. It completes it.

A house composed from two elemental materials — buff fieldstone and vertical-grain cedar — placed in deliberate counterpoint across the valley floor. The flat roof extends far beyond the walls on all sides, creating a covered perimeter that dissolves the boundary between inside and out. At dusk the cedar soffit glows and the stone walls recede, and the house becomes a lantern in the vineyard.

The entry is a compressed passage between stone and cedar, a triangular slot of sky opening above to frame a single conifer. A chain downspout hangs from the darkness. Then the pivot door and the view opens: straight through the house to the Napa Valley beyond. It is an arrival sequence calibrated to the second.

Two stone types are used throughout — a warm buff limestone for the principal walls, a darker grey basalt for secondary elements. Where they meet is a detail worth looking at closely. A horizontal slot window sits low in the buff stone, its reflection showing nothing but vineyard rows.

As featured in Dezeen (2015) and Cottages & Gardens

Two dark gabled volumes set into the Chalk Hill landscape, connected by a courtyard pool that frames the valley beyond. The roofs are clad in a charred shingle that reads black against the golden meadow grass — they crest the ridge like geological formations rather than built objects.

Each gable end opens in a full triangular aperture, vertical timber fins filtering the light and framing a view that changes from dawn to dusk. Inside, the structural rafters are exposed and the floor is wide-plank oak. The furniture was selected with the same rigour as the architecture — Flag chairs in the gable light, positioned to watch the sun cross the triangular opening.

Between the two volumes, a California live oak was preserved and made the centre of the courtyard garden. The rooflines were designed around it. The pool terrace is wrapped in wide timber boards and punctuated by a concrete fireplace that burns through the Sonoma evenings.

As featured in Designboom (2022) and GA Publishers Tokyo

A courtyard house on an idyllic Aegean bay — white plaster walls, a cobalt blue door, and a bougainvillea grown over a white pergola until it becomes the roof. The building is entirely of its place. It does not try to be anything other than what the island already knows how to make.

Tri Porto was designed for a family between London and Greece — two bedrooms, 3,650 square feet, a terrace that is as much a room as anything inside. The courtyard opens to the sea on one side and to the hills on the other. Breakfast is taken under the bougainvillea canopy while fishing boats come and go in the harbour below.

The blue door is the only colour in the palette. Everything else is white plaster, grey stone, the green of cypress and olive, and the particular blue of the Aegean — which changes hour by hour and does not need any help.

A heavy renovation of a house in the hills above Napa — Brandon Jørgensen's own residence for a period, which gives this project a particular kind of authority. When an architect renovates for himself, every decision is tested against the way he actually lives rather than the way he imagines a client might.

The building sits on exposed rock outcroppings in a grove of mature California live oaks and valley oaks. The renovation darkened the exterior to near-black, lowered the window bands to oak canopy height, and replaced the landscape with native California planting — feather grass, agave, low groundcover — that reads as an extension of the rocky hillside rather than a garden imposed upon it.

The terrace is sheltered under an aged metal ceiling that has weathered to the same colour as the oak bark. The views from it go to San Francisco Bay and the valley floor below. A bocce court is set into the gravel under the oaks, string lights through the branches, butterfly chairs at the edge. This is a house that knows how to be used.

Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a detached studio. 2,200 square feet. The studio is where the work gets done; the rest of the house is for everything else.

A winery above the Silverado Trail, sited on a ridge with views across Saint Helena to the full breadth of the Napa Valley. At 10,000 square feet, Inkgrade is large enough to mean something in the landscape — and so the question the design sets out to answer is not how to hide the building, but how to make it belong.

The answer is a roof that becomes a pond. The entire upper plane of the building is flooded — a shallow water table planted with lotus and lily pads that in summer mirrors the sky and in mist dissolves the building entirely. The surface reads as a continuation of the mountain. From across the valley it is indistinguishable from the reservoir below.

The entry is a counterpoint: a vast polished steel canopy cantilevered over the arrival drive, its underside a mirror of the oak grove and the sky. The car arrives under a reflection of the landscape it has just driven through.

Inside, a curved concrete ramp spirals down from an opening in the lily roof into the winery below — the route from sky to cellar made physical. At night, the building inverts: the roof disappears, and the interior glows as a single luminous form on the hillside.

A winery that makes nothing invisible. The entire production facade is a continuous screen of expanded metal mesh — fermentation tanks, oak barrels, the working interior of the building all visible from the vineyard floor. The name FAILLA is embedded as monumental letterforms within the mesh, lit from behind at dusk, reading across the full width of the facade.

The building is earth-integrated, its planted green roof reading as a continuation of the oak-covered hillside above. From the vineyard it presents as a single horizontal gesture — white concrete parapet, glowing mesh facade, vines approaching from below and oaks retreating above. At dusk in autumn, when the vines turn gold and the interior warms against the blue-grey Oregon sky, the building and its landscape become inseparable.

The programme divides into two distinct parts: 5,000 square feet of production facility at grade — tanks, crush pad, working floor — and 10,000 square feet of cave aging and processing cut into the hillside behind. The cave provides the thermal stability the barrels require without mechanical intervention. The production facility offers the transparency the winery's philosophy demands.