Project Description
Orchard House is a custom home designed to pay homage to an orchard that used to cover the area north of Seattle’s Greenlake neighborhood in the early 1900’s along with the heritage trees that remained in the home’s rear yard. The 3,320-square-foot house consists of a series of stacked volumes that create indoor/outdoor spaces with their overhangs and intersections.
The front of the house is screened from the busy street by three large water cisterns that collect all the rainwater falling on the roofs and bring it back into the house for use. These tanks create an entry courtyard and provide sound isolation from the street noise. The house has large windows for passive cooling and daylighting which also serve to reinforce the inside-outside connection. A rain garden in the rear yard is tucked in between the existing trees and serves as the border of the rear patio. Large doors open onto this patio and add to the indoor-outdoor connection.
Sustainable materials are used throughout the home and reclaimed elements provide a contrasting texture to the polished concrete floors on the inside. A large live edged slab milled from a tree removed during construction of the local courthouse functions as a vanity in the powder room and acts as a foil to the clean lines throughout the house. Similarly, the sliding doors throughout the home were fabricated with surplus doors from a local salvage yard.