Treviso Estates

Treviso Estates is three houses built down the same wooded slope, sharing one design language and splitting into two interiors.

The entry is the reason. It had been drawn on the second floor, and moving it down to the lower level turned a service stair into the front door. So the stair had to earn that. We set a wide step-like podium at its base, deep enough to hold planting, and let the climb become the arrival instead of something to get past.

From there the houses diverge. Two of them read in green and warm brass. The third, last in the row and mirrored in plan, is worked through black, white and gray.

Three cladding systems, each doing a job. Cedar board and batten, natural and unsealed, at the entry and wherever the wall comes down to human scale. Large-format white composite panel across the field of the elevation. Dark charcoal fiber cement at the base and in the recessed zones, where the building meets the ground.

Under all of it, board-formed concrete. The foundation walls come out of the hillside at garage level and hold each house to its own piece of the slope. Above that the building lifts away, with decks and balconies cantilevered toward the drop.

Window framing is matte black throughout, set with deliberate asymmetry so the wall stays present between the openings. Railings are a thin steel bar and nothing more. At the upper level the corner windows open into the tree canopy, which is the reason for building this high on the hill in the first place.

The stair is the spine of the plan. It lands in the entry hall, divides the floor in two, and carries every level of the house on one run.

It is also deliberately softened. Slatted screens wrap the core so the structure reads as a filter rather than a wall, and light passes through it into the rooms on both sides. On the right of it sit the kitchen and the nook. On the left, everything you sit down in.

A skylight sits directly over the stair and drops daylight the full height of the house. It makes the upper hall bright in a way that upper halls usually are not.

That light is why there is a sitting area up here at all. A low built-in bench near the door to the primary bedroom, positioned for the view, with no curtains on that window so nothing gets in the way of it.

The kitchen is where the two interiors part company. One version runs green cabinetry under a full stone hood. The other keeps light oak with black counters and a Calacatta wall behind the range.

Both are built the same way underneath. The island is the accent piece, with side shelving and a waterfall that drops on one edge in a more geometric line. A secret door is set into the cabinetry and opens into the pantry. Beside the nook, a buffet is broken into smaller blocks so the run never reads as one heavy mass.

The primary bedroom is panelled in wood and lit from within it, with LED set into the joints rather than hung from the ceiling. The ceiling itself is sloped and we left it that way. Dropping it flat would have been simpler and would have cost the room its height.

The fireplace is finished in the same stone that runs through the kitchen island downstairs and reappears at the vanity upstairs. In the corridor the doors are ordinary. From the bedroom in, they are hidden, flush with the panelling.

The baths are where the two houses diverge again. Two of them take a built-in tub. In the mirrored house the tub stands free, and we built a low construction around it out of the same stone, so it works as a shelf as much as an edge.

The shower takes a tall niche, which gives the wall some verticality, and the wood panels repeat here exactly as they do in the bedroom. The closet carries the gray fronts from the main floor, and in the mirrored house there were enough windows to put a proper makeup counter under one of them.