The feeling of this house came from Greg
and Lesa, they wanted a house that just felt like it was woven into this landscape,
from inside to outside, outside to inside. I'm Greg Faulkner, client and co-architect, I'm
Tom Kundig, co-architect and this is Analog. Well we're in Truckee California. In the summer it's a very desert climate, but
gets about 400 inches of snow a year and we are about 10 miles just over the summit from
Lake Tahoe. The site was just magnificent, so the first thought was how to save all the trees
and still build a house here. When we started to build this house Lesa and I were talking about
what direction we would take and she named a few architects and one was Tom, and it was kind of an
immediate thing where I had this sort of kindred thing with Tom and I'm not sure what it was but
a lot of the things that I know and hold dear he feels the same way about and so it was a great
sort of collaboration in that in that sense. The scheme of the house is really intended to be
quiet to this landscape and what we mean by quiet to the landscape is it just weaves into that
landscape, the landscape becomes part of the house so, really was telling us how to shape
these indoor rooms with the outdoor rooms, saving the trees and it was a perfect
kind of perfect kind of symphony. And you know kind of following on to the
previous question, the reason there was no brief it was really sort of just a vehicle
or an excuse to have fun. Maybe that's the best way to describe it, it wasn't a brief it
wasn't written, it was a conversation between Architects and colleagues and clients, Lesa
certainly has done projects in her background and there was an immediate understanding
of what the agenda was for the building. From the street the house reads as a low
one-storey form that kind of repeats the behaviour of the site and then a tower of
weathering steel rises from that vertically. Upon entry you're immediately met with
a very sculptural screen-like staircase that leads to a four-storey tower, where the
secondary bedrooms and a rooftop deck live, then if you keep moving that's the kitchen and
the utility areas of the house, if you move to the right you'll move through the kitchen and to
the dining room which is all glass and opens up completely to the landscape and then we arrive at
a concrete pavilion within the house which is the living space and then we move through that to get
to the primary bedroom space and private study. The materials for the house are all
singular choices throughout the house, so there's one stone, there's steel, concrete,
glass, and one wood. It's wrapped in weathering steel so as it weathers it'll turn to the
colour of the needles on the forest floor. The materials used on this project are again
materials familiar to Greg and I in our architecture and we specifically see our buildings
as not necessarily a moment in time but a length in time, a long length in time. So you pick
materials that actually get better with age, so if you're in a fantastic natural world like we are
here, the more the sense of the hand, the sense of the craft is actually part of that experience, is
more the natural agenda of the entire project. Big things that move are exciting and if you get to
move them they're even more exciting and so when you can transform a space by sliding open a series
of doors and suddenly the space is not the same, you feel the breeze, I feel it right now, and you
hear the birds and you just sense the landscape, you know changes it from this sort of glass box
to something that's living and breathing and open. So we're actually pulling it apart and exposing
all the interior passageways to the nature of this place, weaving the functions of a house into
the forest. Well in terms of the tactile kind of interactive pieces in the house something
that's a gizmo is an interior fireplace that has guillotine hatches that are operated by
cranks, a faucet tap that's manually operated, it's made out of bronze and there's a big
arm and so you move it down and the water flows and that's a quite fun one. As an
architect you work every day for clients and it's a service industry right and so hiring
Tom and being the client was it was really fun, I got to see the other side of the table and now
I have a really good experience with that and I know what the clients are feeling when they sit
across the table from me. Well I also sometimes ask a question well what was it like working with
another architect certainly at Greg's stature, I said well it was fantastic because in
fact we we just shared the same agenda, it was a conversation, it was seamless, it was
fun and that is golden. Couldn't have been a better better experience, I have to say if my
wife and I do a house we're going to hire Greg. Well I'll tell you what the coolest thing about
the tree house is, houses can become potatoes and so to establish a single storey and then just
a very careful vertical element and glaze it into the treetops so that it is like a treehouse
changes the house from a mass to an experience. I think the best part of this house is that you
hardly see this house, this house sinks into the landscape and what's really important for me is
that this building is quiet to this landscape.
