Miller Hull

For more than a decade, Kas Kinkead and Marty Babcock spent vacations and weekends in a home measuring only 40 square feet. That’s because their second home was a boat, which they moored to a dock after buying an undeveloped lot on Decatur Island, Wash., in 2006.

“It was a 22-foot little power boat with an enclosed cabin, a little heater and a sleeping berth,” said Ms. Kinkead, 67, a landscape architect at Osborn Consulting. “We learned living on that little boat that we could live in a small space together.”

She and Ms. Babcock, 72, a retired nurse practitioner, were happy for many years, as they explored the area, got to know their neighbors in the San Juan Islands and admired the natural beauty of their rugged hillside lot, which they had purchased for about $200,000. The only problem was that the longer they owned their land, the more time they wanted to spend there, away from their primary home in Seattle, which was a challenge when the temperature dropped.

“We decided we could start staying in the wintertime,” Ms. Kinkead said, “but that wasn’t really tenable on the boat because the water is too cold and too rough.”

It was finally time to build something bigger, and on land. But hoping to preserve the property’s natural beauty as much as possible, they wanted only a small cabin, and to minimize damage to the landscape.

Their lot is steeply sloped, and only accessible by gravel paths designed for golf carts, which presented a challenge. “We looked at that slope and tried to imagine digging out half of it for a concrete foundation, which was just horrifying to us,” Ms. Babcock said.

“We didn’t want to deal with a lot of construction trucks hauling off dirt,” Ms. Kinkead added.

At the same time, however, they wanted a structure that was robust enough to stand the test of time. “We prefer well-made things,” Ms. Kinkead said. “I was very mindful of building a project that wasn’t going to have a life-span of 20 years. I really wanted something that mattered, that counted and that was built to last.”

For design help, they turned to the Miller Hull Partnership, an architecture firm that had designed other homes on the island. Ms. Kinkead was familiar with the firm as the chair of the community’s design review committee.

“Rather than making a huge cut or excavation into this hillside, Kas wanted to float the building above the landscape,” said Cory Mattheis, a senior associate at Miller Hull. “Letting the landscape flow underneath it was an idea she brought forward as a landscape architect and informed how we fundamentally approached the project.”

Read the full story at The New York Times