The Verge House

This custom home for a professional couple with two children meets the family’s desire for privacy, offering a response to site constraints through architectural expression. The front façade, clad in Shou Sugi Ban, hides the home’s most significant features from the street.

Surrounded by floor-to-ceiling glass and Jatoba wood, the first-floor design focuses the eye on created beauty, including a suspended hanging wall with a ceramic art installation, a cantilevered staircase, and a custom children’s play stage that doubles as storage. The living, dining, and kitchen areas subvert traditional distinctions between interior and exterior space through use of retractable glass walls.   The second-floor master suite wraps around a bamboo tree that extends out of the roof’s oval oculus. This shared outdoor deck leads directly to the vegetated roof garden.   To add to the home’s meditative nature, a yoga area has a living green wall that looks out to the cantilevered lap pool extending over a hand-chiseled limestone landscape below.