Project: Home House
Architecture: GO′C
GO’C design team: Jon Gentry, AIA; Aimée O’Carroll, ARB; Ben Kruse
Structural and civil engineering: Harriott Valentine Engineers
Location: Home, Key Peninsula, Washington
Photo Credits: Andrew Pogue
Courtesy by GO′C
This new house is located in Western Washington on the Key Peninsula in a small township named Home. The waterfront site is located on the south end of Puget Sound and angles towards an incredible view of Mount Rainier beyond.
The building section and early plan diagrams drove the layout for this new structure. The house was oriented parallel to the shoreline, allowing the building to nestle into the hillside across the two floors. This created an opportunity to harness unobstructed views toward the water and Mount Rainier from both the large main level deck and the lower-level beach room. The result is a series of outdoor rooms that you encounter as you move throughout the house across both levels, emphasizing the connection to the landscape. Transition spaces were designed to guide you through the entry sequence and passage from the exterior to the beach are expressed through a series of screen walls which gradually draw you toward the interior. These screen walls reappear a few times throughout the project, creating privacy where needed and a recognizable design thread that stitches through both levels of the house.
The east side offers a generously sized deck with both covered and open-air spaces that look out onto the large panoramic view Mount Rainier and Puget Sound. The west side is more private, offering a smaller, more intimate, gathering around an outdoor firepit with landscape walls that will grow around the perimeter over the next few years. The north south axis of the main living area bridges over two volumes that anchor the structure below leaving a large opening in the middle of that floor plan that serves as the main indoor / outdoor activity space. This beach room on the lower level becomes a busy hub in the spring and summer months allowing all the family’s activities to be directly connected from the house to the water.
