The owners’ directive was simple yet inspiring: “We hired you to be creative, so let loose the creativity.” We designed the house specifically for our clients, a therapist and an actor, dividing the space into extroverted and introverted halves. One half holds the living room, kitchen, and screened porch and hovers just above the ground for fairway views. The other half is a quiet escape that sits in the earth and looks toward a garden.

The dividing line between openness and refuge also organizes the interior spaces, which are arranged to align with the daily cycle. Mornings begin on the east end with breakfast, followed by versatile inside/outside living to the south during midday. As evening approaches, the north and west ends are a place to unwind with bedrooms adjacent to landscaping.

The most unique feature of the Fairway Bend Residence is most evident from above. The house is composed of two asymmetric, rotated hip roofs, with a hole in the larger one. The asymmetric roofs allow wider overhangs where reducing solar heat gain is important, and less wide where it is unimportant.

The larger of the two roofs over the primary wing surrounds a central open-air atrium. The single-story glass atrium is at the center and tallest part of the house, allowing daylighting into the darkest part of the interior. This reduces reliance on artificial lighting, and with operable windows in the upper atrium facilitating cross ventilation through stack-effect, it also reduces reliance on mechanical cooling.

Fairway Bend Residence prioritizes energy efficiency and is designed to integrate space and use. The compact footprint is arranged so that hallways are minimized allowing for direct transitions from room to room. No use is redundant, and each building component serves an environmental as well an architectural function. For instance, the thermally modified Mojave Hemlock siding provides increased fire-resistance and reduced flame spread.