Valentine House
The Valentine House is an abstract composition of folding wall and roof planes exploring the tensions of light and dark, solid and void, protection and exposition – yet nevertheless crafted with a thoroughly domestic program in mind. Clad almost entirely in blackened or bleached cedar boards, the Valentine house?s materiality relates closely to its 10-acre forested site, allowing for an unapologetically modern formal vocabulary to take hold without feeling pretentious or alien in imposition.
Photography by © Alan Brandt
Three linear wood-clad ?solid? volumes are stacked and shifted relative to one another to support and frame a fourth transparent ?void?, which serves as an indoor-outdoor entry gallery. The position and orientation of the home have been located to capture the tremendous far-field views of the Cascade Mountains to the west, visible only along a narrow axial corridor on the large site. This linear axis served as the starting point for the design, in that the ?void? space framed by the solid volumes occupies this view corridor precisely. Photography by © Alan Brandt
Each of the ?solid? volumes houses a particular set of program and is accessed by (or sometimes closed off from) the central void space. This allows for tremendous flexibility in day-to-day domestic use; for instance, the parents? wing can be functionally separated from the rest of the home, allowing for tranquility and privacy if all four of the family?s children take over t...