In DesignA weekend residence for a family near Lake Tahoe — currently in design development
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.
