LABYRINTH SITE

This site is an excellent example of the manipulation of scale, proportion, sequence and view. Sitting in a neighborhood of traditional and predictable homes, across the street from a park, the site presents itself to the street as a walled garden, a mysterious private realm insulated from traffic by a bosque of trees, garden walls, screens, and a series of hedges. It is difficult to tell where the garden stops and the house begins. A first time visitor has no idea what lies beyond the garden gate.

The journey from street to house presents a series of unanticipated experiences involving the sound of water, changes of grade and direction, spatial compression and expansion, and contrasting textures and materials. On a block full of traditional, non-functional front yards, a private outdoor room has been created. House and garden are developed as an integrated series of architectonic walls and planes, architectural materials expand into the garden and landscape surfaces extend into the house. The result, in a dense urban neighborhood, is remarkable privacy.

Views into and out from the house are carefully composed by the arrangement of windows, parapets, garden walls, screens, and hedges. Within the home, one is presented with a surprising sequence of views, of differing scales and orientations. Using the ancient Japanese principle of borrowed scenery, shakkei, middle-ground views of adjacent houses, streets, and rooftops are eliminated. In this way, more distant landscape elements from the park and neighborhood trees are “borrowed” to become part of this house and garden.

The design concepts described, in conjunction with the slope of the site, facilitated the creation of the greatest surprise of all. After traveling through a labyrinth of intimate and private outdoor spaces, one opens the front door of the house, by architects Suyama Peterson Deguchi, to reveal the unobstructed panorama of Elliott Bay and the City of Seattle.