Cloud House

A workshop and home built into a twenty-acre ridgetop, shaped by the light, the views, and a year spent simply learning the land.

Cloud House sits on a twenty-acre ridgetop site outside Portland. Before any design began, the clearcut, debris-strewn property had to be recovered: old structures demolished, fencing removed, the land cleared. What followed was a year of simply living with the site, camping and visiting through the seasons, before building a modest deck under the property's one remaining stand of fir trees.

The brief called for a workshop and a home in one structure: ground-floor space for woodworking equipment and motorcycles, paired with a one-bedroom residence above meant to eventually serve as a guest house and artist studio. The design takes its form from agricultural buildings, a simple gable-roofed rectangle, built on a steel frame engineered off-site by Oregon's Web Steel and bolted together on site. A glass garage door opens the workshop to the surrounding lawn, while the roof extends past one end to shelter an outdoor bay through the winter months. The exterior is clad in marine-grade Douglas fir plywood, cut into an oversized custom shingle pattern.

Upstairs, a single main room does most of the work: high ceilings, a galley kitchen, built-in bookcases, a wood stove, and a window that looks straight down into the workshop below. A sliding door opens onto a second-floor deck, with a modest bedroom and bathroom set to one side.

Today the workshop holds tools, motorcycles, and a disco ball for parties, while the home above offers a quiet counterpoint with long views over the land, a functional, unfussy first move on a site still very much in progress.

Press:
Dwell: A Couple Pining for Their Woodsy Upbringings Experiment With a Retreat in the Pacific Northwest