PALETTE HOUSE

Our charge was to create an innovative guest house atop an existing garage and develop a new stair to access the main house uphill.

The guest house is essentially one room with simple moving partitions to create variations of sleeping, eating, living and bathing.  Our main focus of design was on the permeable perimeter skin of the house. As a series of repeated, louvered pallets, they alternately allow privacy or openness to a view or sunlight depending on internal program or external site factors.  Each panel is an architectonic unit easily constructed and applied around the perimeter of the house. The skin takes on a significant presence in creating light, shadow, view, privacy, etc.

We designed a ‘floating’ meandering stair through an existing oleander thicket with long landings for rest on the way up the client’s steep site.  We created a repetitive precast concrete “T” form for each step to standardize the construction and allow the existing ground plane to continue to flow beneath each tread.