Issaquah Heights

Set above the forest in Issaquah, this 4,200-square-foot home arrived with its architecture already resolved. AVI was engaged for the interior.

The work was to continue that logic inward, using stone, warm wood and a restrained palette so the geometry stays legible rather than decorated. The client approved the concept at the first presentation, and only minor details changed after that.

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At the entry, storage is absorbed into a full-height oak wall, so the hall itself stays empty.

The organizing move is a single wall. Board-marked concrete runs from the exterior through the entry into the living room, where the fireplace is cut into it and framed in gunmetal, with a thin metal ledge carried on toward the staircase. Above, a slatted wood ceiling brackets living, dining and kitchen into one volume and returns the double height to human scale.

Atmosphere is built from material hierarchy rather than color: concrete, wood, metal, stone. Every element answers a proportion already set by the architecture, so the interior reads as a continuation rather than a second layer.

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The kitchen is resolved by subtraction. The appliances are absorbed into a full-height run of oak, the Gaggenau cooktop sets its burners flush into the counter and moves the controls to the cabinet front, and the cabinetry runs without handles.

A single countertop extends the full length of the window, which turns the planted slope outside into the backdrop for every working surface. The island reads as one stone from the wall to the waterfall edge, lit from a concealed strip beneath the shelf. Oak below, stone above. The room is legible in two materials.

The concrete wall ends in a linear fireplace set flush into its face, and the room turns from there into the dining area.

The table sits in the corner where two glass walls meet, so the room has no visual back. One solid surface answers all that glass: a full-height oak panel carrying the artwork, with the credenza set below it. It gives the eye somewhere to stop.

Everything else stays open to the forest, and the only pattern in the room is the grain of the wood.

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The living room is glazed on two sides, so light moves through it rather than into it. The floor is poured seamless rather than laid, so no joint breaks the plane, and the slatted ceiling turns down onto the walls at the edges, closing the volume without a cornice and holding a double-height room at the scale of the people standing in it.

Furniture carries the only saturated color in the house: terracotta upholstery, a round stone table, and a single cascade of pendants hung long enough to occupy the height. The pendants are there for proportion, not decoration, and nothing in the room competes with the forest through the glass.

The corridor to the private wing is left bare, so the works on one side and the light at its end carry it.

The bathroom is built from two materials and nothing else. The basins are cut from the same stone as the walls, so the counter reads as one continuous block rather than a fixture set on top of it. Beneath it, an oak carcass lifts the mass off the floor and carries the only warmth in the room.

Everything that would normally interrupt a surface is taken out of sight. The shower is sized for two and drains through a channel concealed under the floor, the glass partition is a single fixed pane, and the fittings are specified in gunmetal so they recede rather than punctuate. What is left is light, shadow and proportion.

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