Case Studies · 10 Jun 2026 · 10 min read

Case study: Hillside House

From concept to completion, the story of a house designed for a young family on a difficult slope.

The site was a steep, wooded slope that two previous owners had given up on. Our first move was to stop fighting it: the house sits in the hill rather than on it, with the bedrooms dug into the ground and the living floor cantilevered above the trees.

The clients asked for one thing above all, which was to see the valley from the kitchen. Every other decision, from the timber cladding to the position of the stair, followed from that sentence.

Construction took fourteen months. The hardest part was not the cantilever but the access road, which had to carry a concrete truck up a slope that previously carried only deer.