Immersive Led Displays Transform a Korean Resort Into a Shimmering Crystal Palace

Whether you sprinkle them sparingly or pile them on, these cool cushions can turn your garden into a stylish party pad.

This is a full-time beach house for a car passionate family of four situated across from Burnt Cedar Beach in Incline Village, Nevada on the north shore of Lake Tahoe. Prior to being pulled up the hill to flumes and rails destined for Virginia City, logs were staged here as the mountains around the lake shore were logged during the silver mining years of the 1860s. Set into a neighborhood originally built in the 1950s and bordered by houses to the sides and rear, the house takes a simple box form, half buried into the slope. It faces the lake with full height glazing that encloses a loft-like plan with double height living spaces. The clients requested a space that felt like the landscape and maintained a feeling inside of being outside in the light and shadow play of the sixty to ninety-foot Jeffrey and Ponderosa pines that populate the lake shore.  Perforated wood ceilings and acoustical plaster walls soften the sounds of the concrete and glass pavilion-like house. An underground garage is excavated under the house with level access to the street, a must in this snowy climate for a family with an eclectic car collection.

The trapezoidal tracing of the property is what defined the construction of this house into three clearly settled volumes. Vegetation also plays a protagonist role in the design of this house, both outdoors and indoors. The exterior trees enclose the house generating distinct tons of shades and colours during the different seasons of the year. Within the interior, the unruly green vegetation, contrasts with the stone floors and solid walls, reaching a perfect sense of balance. The entrance, a double height lobby that creates contrasting sensations and distinct visual ending points originated by water mirrors, light shafts, a tree and a staircase. The walls that shape this area, divide the spaces into private and public areas. The ground floor, is organized into two blocks each with a different purpose: The left side, is a white solid cube that integrates the study and the master bedroom and is separated from the other block by a water mirror and a yard that generates the desired privacy, peace and tranquility. The right side, the social area, is a rectangle closed to the west by a rigid wall and opened towards the interior of the house through large floor to ceiling glass walls, giving sober transparency to the yard with views to the garden and the central courtyard. The different angles within the construction achieve visual ending points with great character, as well as, enhancing the sensations provoked by the pure whites that evolve into mixed tones as the day and the seasons go by.

Sited gently on the lower slope of a dramatic sixty foot high coastal bank and surrounded by miles of undeveloped Cape Cod National Seashore beaches and scrub pines is a warm, modern beach house that is more than just a place to enjoy uninterrupted ocean views and sea breezes. Our clients dreamed of a house that would work equally well as both a year-round family “camp” and also as a “thinking retreat” for collaborating with their colleagues. From the beginning of design it was critically important to us and to our clients – as well as the Town Conservation Commission and National Seashore representatives – that the house fit into its fragile site seamlessly. Our team responded with great care by designing the house to curve and shift softly with the natural topography and also by envisioning the new native and drought resistant landscaping growing back tight to the house as if both had always been there together. The main house is conceived of as a collage of overlapping, cantilevered planes and volumes that culminate in a large living / dining space defined by an asymmetrically arcing copper roof plane. Entry to the house is by way of a long ramp through what will in a few years be a thicket of native pines and bushes, then through curving cedar shingled planes. The inland side of the house is tucked into its shifting, sandy landscape and is comprised of cedar shingled planes that float above the ground and contain bedrooms, bathrooms, and the kitchen, and lower volumes of horizontal tongue and groove cedar boards that enclose bedrooms and a gathering space for teenage sons. On the Cape Cod Bay side, the house opens up through walls of glass to endless water views and heavenly sea breezes. In the middle of the house, just inside the front door, is an architectural “hole” that allows the house to breathe and cool itself naturally most of the year through its floor to ceiling awning windows, and which also provides views of the sky from a shady breezeway on the lower level. Along one wall of the hole is a trellis planted with evergreen and seasonally aromatic flowering vines. On the Cape Cod Bay side, the house opens up through walls of glass to endless water views and heavenly sea breezes. In the middle of the house, just inside the front door, is an architectural “hole” that allows the house to breathe and cool itself naturally most of the year through its floor to ceiling awning windows, and which also provides views of the sky from a shady breezeway on the lower level. Along one wall of the hole is a trellis planted with evergreen and seasonally aromatic flowering vines. Separated from the main house by a screen porch and contiguous deck, is a separate art / yoga / thinking studio that seemingly floats fourteen feet above the ground. Inside is a single large loft space as well as a full bath, and below is an open-air summer art studio and boat / beach toy storage, behind walls of wood slats and matching barn doors.