Inside a Woodland Home Built Over Water to Become One With Nature

[somber music]

My favorite architectural scene in all movies

is when Dorothy opens the door.

And outside the door, it's color from black and white.

And that quite possibly is the first time most people

had ever seen color film in their life.

The right sort of buildup to something really beautiful.

I call it choreography.

The best way to experience architecture is by moving

through it and scanning and looking around.

And so if you realize that,

then you can make the architecture amplify the place.

I'm Jim Cutler, Principal Designer

at Cutler Anderson Architects,

and I designed this place about 10 years ago.

[gentle music]

I got a call like we always do from potential clients,

and they had already chosen a piece of land

and it was a hilltop and it was really beautiful spot,

but I needed to remind them that it's very easy

to bring cars into places,

but it's really hard to get them out.

We were coming down from that hilltop

and I noticed a visual clearing in the woods,

and I, I said, what's that over there?

They said, oh, it's an old logging pond.

You know, it's all filled in.

And I walked around and there's this wonderful tree stump

outside here, and I said, you know,

if I was gonna design something for you,

I'd design something here

and I would integrate the building and the pond

as one thing.

And they asked me why.

And I explained to them at that point in my career,

and I had become very versed to killing anything,

any living thing.

I mean, the world is just so beautiful

and everything has the same right to be here,

whether it's inanimate or a plant or a creature.

For many years I felt that fostering life,

creating habitat is a high calling in life.

And you know, water fosters life.

And I could somehow integrate a pond in a building.

If we build it, they will come, put it that way.

And one time I was out here with Michael,

one half of the owners, and he's very in touch

with the living world.

So we were sitting out here in the evening, he said,

you know, about 10 minutes, the flickers are gonna come by

and they're gonna start eating the insects off the pond.

10 minutes the flickers come by.

And then the swallows are gonna come by.

The swallows come in, it's getting a little dark.

I think the bats are gonna come in, bats come in.

This place had connected him to the rhythms of life

that water fosters power

of architecture is emotional.

When you choose a place that you're going to dwell in,

then there's an obligation to know that place well,

because there's life.

[birds singing]

We're coming up the walk to the house

and we deliberately parked guests far away.

And we designed it in a way

to make it actually quite narrow.

And you can see that you sense the clearing

just by the amount of sky you can see beyond these trees.

But to reinforce what happens

when you walk in the front door

that you open up to the pond,

we even tighten the path up further.

And then as you come on the house,

you know there's something special

on the other side of that door.

And we wanted to give some implication

you were gonna get there,

but the door then acts as the foil.

[gentle music]

I am squeezing you because the tighter it is,

the bigger big feels.

The lighter it is, the darker dark is.

By contrast, they amplify one another.

But I don't wanna be like boo, you know,

to surprise you when you walk in the door.

So I wanted to bring a little bit of the pond on that side,

and I wanted you to see over the roof

so you could sense the clearing on this side

and create a level of anticipation of arriving somewhere.

[gentle music]

These are steel beams holding this up.

The reason the steel beams is we thought

we'd have a lot of view.

If I had to do this in wood, they would've been much thicker

and deeper and we would've blocked view.

So then you have to start using materials

within their nature.

Once you get going on a design.

And if you're lucky, and if you're listening,

it tells you what it wants.

It's this sort of cacophony of different voices are made of.

The steel wants to show what it can do.

The wood wants to show what it can do.

You know, the forest wants to show its history

and its nature.

The water wants to show how it fosters life.

How do you take all that cacophony of voices

and you turn it into a harmony?

That's my job.

[gentle music]

The owners wanted the stronger connection

to the pond as possible.

So when we designed this, I had a lot of fun.

Kinda see this right here.

It's about a 400 pound piece of lead,

and there's one on either side.

It counterweight this door, let's see if it'll open.

[gentle music]

Now that's an 800 pound door.

And that wasn't so hard to lift

because now you can see the leads all the way down here.

And that is a heavy piece of lead.

And so we have three of them, one at the kitchen,

one at the living room, and one in the bedroom.

So that when you're in the building,

you don't necessarily need to be in the building.

You can be in the pond. Oh, another frog.

Nope, two frogs, look at them.

You gotta have a place to dive off.

You don't wanna splash water back on the oak floor.

And it, you know, it just seemed like such a poetic spot

to sit in the evening.

You can take it all in,

all the sounds, all the animals, everything.

And to some degree you can take in the silence.

[gentle music]

It's a nice kitchen. We'd wanted to have a window there.

And it was also the best possible place for the range.

It was a fun thing to design. And it works shockingly.

Now the fireplace is the lateral stability.

We're in a sizeable earthquake zone.

And if you do a roof like this

where you can see all the way from one end to the other,

that's a lot of load up high.

So that if earthquake wants to move the building sideways,

well it's gonna do it.

And the only way to restrain that lateral movement

is with some degree of mass

or a structural stability in this axis.

So the fireplace is a structural element,

and for me, a statement about the lateral forces

that are endemic to this region.

[gentle music]

I had say 95% of the building was from this region,

you know, and it's reflective of this region.

You know, glulam beams were invented here.

Vertical grain for plywood was invented here

and comes here because it's the only place

Douglas fir grows.

And it's light. So it's well suited for structure.

Cedar, which the outside of the building

is made up, red cedar, which is from here

because it's highly aerated

and it's a very light, physically light wood,

and it's extremely rot resistant.

So we're using it within its nature.

We're using the Douglas fir within its nature.

So you'll notice there are little bits of concrete

out on the corners here, and they all line up.

So when you look at the site plan of this,

it looks like an ancient giant swimming pool

that has been partly, let's say,

subsumed by detritus and sediments.

But still there's a vestige of that swimming pool.

I look back on it now,

I think that's a little bit of a proof for a metaphor,

but I wanted to create a sense of time.

And by leaving objects in the landscape,

it pushes the time reference for the project.

[gentle music]

The bedroom is pretty much all the same in sense,

one thing I would say is it is classed between

the living room and bedroom, because we wanted the roof,

which is the sheltering element, to be one continuous plane

that would be a apparent

to make this feel more like a pavilion.

You know, when you think of pavilions,

you think of an outdoor area under a roof.

My god, that cat has an a regal pose doesn't he?

I like the needle.

He's a good one.

[gentle music]

And you have to walk outside to get the guest house.

And I'll tell you, I built a little cabin

for my daughter and myself.

She actually helped build it when she was 11.

And it's a wonderful thing.

and it's only about 35 feet

from the front door of our house.

And there is not one night that goes by

when I'm running back and forth and look out at the water

or listen to the wind in the trees, or look at the moon

or what planets are coming by.

And I had no hesitation making that separation

where you gotta walk outside

to get to another room in the house.

When you go from this one to that one,

you experience the outside, you hear the water,

you see the water, and if it's windy, you hear the trees.

If it's snowing or raining,

you hear the water coming down in the pond.

Why not experience the place fully?

I mean, it's really a joy.

[gentle music]

I talked about architecture being shelter.

We could take that and say it's clothing, right?

Keeps you warm and dry.

So if your clothing needs institution of family,

you better know it's anatomy.

I mean, you're wearing a sweatshirt right now

and might be from a Gap for all I know,

but one size kind of fits all.

It's got sleeves and a hole for your head

and you know, piece to cover your trunk.

But in a way that's no different than this house

or the institution of family that you're gonna clothe.

Because families have very specific qualities.

There are public zones like the room we're in,

and there are private zones like the bedrooms,

and there are decision points like entries

where you get to make a decision

whether you want to participate on something in the public

or you want to go to your private zone.

And that they don't wanna mix.

They want to have as much separation as possible.

And in small houses, that's tricky.

But that's the anatomy you're trying to clothe.

The only difference between me and the Gap,

is you can think of me more as a Savile Row,

you know, tailor.

I tailor things.

[gentle music]

When you bring someone

to an emotional understanding of things,

of something that's beautiful, they learn to love it.

And teaching people to love the living world

is actually I think, the highest quality

that any human being could have

because we're killing this place.

I want to describe a method of working

that is different than the mainstream.

And I'm hoping that I hit a few lucky souls that get it

and move in that direction.

[tender music]