Saratoga Beach House

The Beach house: “All Grown-In”

It is always a rare pleasure to get pictures from our happy clients.  Especially when they turn the camera on the architecture projects that have transformed their lives – and … even more so when they buy a drone and try out their airborne camera on one of our favorite projects, completed over a dozen years ago!  Revisiting the Beach House in this blog as it grows-into the Vancouver Island Coastline is a special delight.  

The home was deliberately designed to blend in with the surrounding coastline.  It was engineered to be light on the land – from its pilots foundations,  hand dug and arranged to avoid the roots of centuries old trees, to its deep rooted invisible sea wall and the inverted dispersal roof drainage.   Its radiant all-electric heating, its green roofs, and power independence – is exemplary of what development should look like on these beautiful riparian edges.  It is ecologically integrated, invisible to the mature vegetation which has grown to engulf and protect it. Its partnership with the land is a testament to our clients’ commitment to our intimate design process of careful integration of landscape and architecture to benefit both the dweller and the site dwelled within.  

The sea wall has replenished and built up the beach, and has become a grassy gentle rocky outcrop, and its planted driveway and native gardens have comfortably completely grown in.  With respect for its habitat the home is taking root, as it floats above the Oyster River flood plain on random peers that thread the roots of the ancient Douglas Firs.  The entire project from architecture to site flood mitigation, and ecological controls, was designed to honor the land and the specificity of “Place”.  In sympathy with the critical natural resources that are part of how these coastline edges regenerate the house helps preserve and support the richly diverse ecosystems that have flourished here for centuries. 

We enjoyed how hard it was to see the house in some shots – like a shy observer camouflaged into the landscape – the home seems to shelter amongst the tees and blend with the logs and tidal debris on the shore,  as it peeks out of the riparian ocean front landscape it is intimately invested within. 

See more about this project here.