Behind the Build: Casa Aldea

The first time Nadia and I walked the Casa Aldea site, it was raining. The kind of November rain that turns Oregon hillsides into rivers. We were standing on a 2.4-acre slope in Lake Oswego, looking through the Douglas firs at a view of the Cascades that appeared and disappeared as the clouds moved.

The clients — a couple who had spent fifteen years looking for the right place to build — had asked us a question we hadn't heard before: "Can you build something that makes us feel like we're always slightly outside, even when we're inside?"

That question became our brief.

The design took five months. Not because we were slow — we developed three complete concepts — but because it took that long to find the answer. The breakthrough came on a Tuesday in March, when Nadia sketched a section through the hillside that showed a house not sitting on the slope but inserted into it. The main volume buried into the earth on one side, cantilvered over it on the other. A building that was simultaneously grounded and airborne.

From that sketch, everything followed: the basalt plinth that anchors the structure to the hillside geology; the long cedar-clad roof that extends beyond the walls to create covered outdoor spaces in every direction; the floor-to-ceiling glazing on the view side that dissolves the boundary we'd been asked to dissolve.

Construction took fourteen months. The most memorable moment came when we placed the last of the site-quarried basalt stones around the plinth. The clients drove down from Portland to see it, and they stood for a long time without saying anything.

Then: "It looks like it's been here forever."

That's the thing about getting it right. You can't take credit for it. It just looks inevitable.