Approach & Exterior
Arrival across the koi ponds, garage court, lakeside elevations
A wooded, waterside site called for a house that reads less as one building than as a settlement of pavilions — each roof its own hip, each room opened wide to the grounds, and every threshold in between treated as its own event.
Asian Pavilion treats the house as a small compound rather than a single mass. Four low hip-roofed volumes — entry, great room and kitchen, primary suite, and garage — step across the site and are stitched together by open-sided breezeways, so no walk from one room to the next happens entirely indoors. The deep, uninterrupted eaves and burnt-sienna fascia are doing double duty: they shade the glass below and give the whole roofscape a single, calm horizontal line even as the plan bends around the site.
Koi ponds sit right at the entry sequence, so arriving at the front door means crossing water first. That same instinct — bring the outside in as far as it will go — carries through the rest of the compound. Breezeways frame views straight through to a second koi pond, the cedar hot tub, and the lake beyond; the kitchen pavilion opens onto a raised, covered patio for dining outdoors; and a full wall of folding glass doors turns the great room into a covered porch whenever the weather allows.
Inside, the palette turns light and warm: pale timber millwork, wide-plank wood floors, and black granite counters. At the heart of the great room, an open timber frame topped with a slatted lattice sits over the kitchen island, hung with planters and lit by skylights above, so the kitchen reads as a pavilion within a pavilion. Bookshelves are built into the posts and half-walls, and a media wall with a linear fireplace anchors the living area. In the primary suite, a wood stove, birch-print wallcovering, and a red lacquer armoire set a quieter, more personal tone, with French doors and windows opening to the garden on every side.