PRACTICE AREA
CUSTOM HOMES
WE DESIGN BEAUTIFUL HOMES THAT ARE MEANT TO LAST.
Finding Respite and Rejuvenation
Residential work is personal, and at its best creates a restorative backdrop for daily life. While custom homes are a smaller segment of our portfolio, we love the opportunity to design places of respite in remarkable settings – often across Puget Sound, Eastern Washington, and Arizona. Many of our residential projects have developed through our long-term relationships with commercial clients, friends, and family – relationships built on trust and mutual respect.
Supporting Clients Upstream of Design
We’re often engaged with clients while they’re looking for property to build on, analyzing real estate purchases with the benefit of understanding sites’ constraints and opportunities, resulting in informed buyers and clients. Every site has strengths to honor—views, light, trees, topography, weather—and every family has patterns, rituals, and priorities that deserve architectural clarity.
Simple Living
We value simplicity—not as minimalism for its own sake, but as a form of quiet competence. While commercial and institutional architecture can serve as canvases for avant-garde design exploration, our homes should be a place of safety, serenity, and straightforward form and material. An environment that doesn’t constantly demand attention but instead acts as a backdrop for family life. This requires practical layouts, durable materials, healthy indoor environments, and details that feel inevitable rather than performative.
Coherence in Renovations and Additions
We have little patience for mismatched additions: we believe the best residential renovations look like they’ve always belonged—integrated in massing, proportion, and material. This approach requires a deep understanding of existing structures, careful attention to materials and proportions, and respect for the original design intent.
COMMON QUESTIONS
What are the key steps in the design process, and how involved will we be?
We hope you’ll be VERY involved; we enjoy teaching our clients about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. Our design process begins with asking lots of questions and listening intently to gain a deep understanding of the people who will inhabit a home: how you live now, how you want to live, what feels essential, and what feels like noise. From there, we translate values into form, material, and spatial sequence. We create preliminary concepts for your review and feedback. Once a concept is approved, we develop detailed plans and construction documents.
Can you incorporate environmentally responsible design strategies into our home?
Absolutely. Designing homes that employ responsible use of materials, that are judicial in their energy usage, and that provide healthy indoor air quality is a responsibility we take seriously. We aim to maximize natural light and ventilation, specify responsible materials and systems, and create efficient homes that reduce environmental impact and help lower long-term energy costs.
Can you help us find a general contractor, and how do you collaborate with builders?
Yes, we’re happy to assist with the contractor selection process. We can recommend qualified builders, review bids with you, and help make informed comparisons to choose the right fit for your project. We’re also available to coordinate meetings with potential contractors to ensure they fully understand the project goals and design intent.
Once construction begins, we remain closely involved—our clear, detailed drawings support efficient collaboration, and we’re always available to answer questions, provide clarifications, and help ensure the final result stays true to the vision.
”We had the pleasure of working with Mark on the remodel of our condominium at Continental Place in Seattle. Mark was thoughtful in the design, and his desire to understand our lifestyle was important to us. It was his kindness, warmth and easy-to-be-with style that led to a great collaboration and a close relationship, a person we're delighted to recommend as a professional, and one we call a friend.
Janet StarrHomeowner
