Highlands Harmony

Six thousand square feet is easy to plan badly: the rooms grow, and the space between them turns into leftover. Here the circulation carries the project. The entry opens into a foyer, the foyer into a gallery of four hundred square feet, and the gallery into the stair hall, so the house is read as a route before it is read as a set of rooms.

Upstairs the same logic holds. A hall of nearly six hundred square feet organizes the bedrooms, and the office is reached across a bridge over the void rather than off a corridor.

The ground floor also carries what a house this size often pushes out of sight: a steam room and a sauna planned as two separate rooms, and a guest bedroom with its own bath. Upstairs there is a media room and a small second kitchen, so the first floor does not have to be crossed at night.

The house sits in the trees, and its answer to them is one tall room. The stair hall runs the full two storeys with glazing on two sides, so the forest is not a view framed at eye level but a wall of it from the floor to the top of the house.

The planting is then brought over the threshold. A ledge at the mezzanine carries greenery that spills into the void, and beds run along the glass below it, so the line where the building stops is deliberately hard to find.

Everything else is calibrated against that. The interior holds to a narrow band of warm grey and brown, and the brightest thing in any room is what is growing outside it.

Living, dining and kitchen share one volume under the double height, and they are separated by furniture rather than by walls. The dining table sits closest to the glass, the seating turns inward to the fireplace, and the kitchen holds the back of the room where the ceiling comes down.

Seen from the landing above, the arrangement reads as three islands on a single floor plane. That view is the reason the plan works: nothing in it is pushed against a wall, so the room keeps its depth from either end.

The fireplace is a linear burner set into a full-height chimney breast of pale travertine, with the television above it and walnut panelling running to either side. It is the one element in the room that goes all the way to the ceiling.

In the kitchen the same travertine returns as a thick worktop over dark walnut cabinetry with recessed pulls. There are no handles and no upstand, so from the seating side the island reads as a stone bar rather than as the working half of the room.

The master bedroom takes the circular move that the rest of the house avoids. A disc of reeded veneer is recessed into the ceiling above the bed, and the pendants hang from inside it, so the fitting belongs to the ceiling rather than to the room.

Below it the headboard wall is walnut with vertical strips of light let into the joints. The seating is kept low and loose, so nothing on the floor competes with the ceiling for the height it borrows.

The bathroom is planned around two stone monoliths rather than a vanity run. Each basin is cut from a single block of veined stone and stands free of the wall, with the storage set behind them in fluted walnut, so the heavy things are in the middle of the room and the light things are at its edges.

The tub sits in the window and the shower is glazed on two sides, which leaves the plan almost entirely open. Only the walnut piers give it any rhythm, and they run floor to ceiling to keep the room reading as one space.

The closet is detailed as a room and not as storage. It runs as a corridor with glazed and solid fronts on both sides, light concealed in every vertical joint, and a bench and mirror closing the far end, so it is somewhere to get dressed rather than somewhere to fetch clothes from.

The spa downstairs is treated the same way. Steam room and sauna are separate rooms, the sauna keeps a full window onto the trees, and a screen of wooden slats stands in front of the glass: the point of a window that size is what you look at while you sit, not the daylight.