Miller Hull

In 1987, Seattle architecture firm The Miller Hull Partnership started designing cabins on Decatur Island in the San Juans. That legacy continues to this day. For its latest residential project, the firm designed a trestle cabin on the island for two longtime Seattle residents. The compact 868-square-foot cabin sits perched at the edge of a native fir and madrone forest on a site defined by steep topography and southerly views across the San Juan Islands. The challenging site required a novel design approach that embraced levitation rather than excavation as a general strategy. The cabin has a steel exoskeleton that negotiates the sloping topography by lifting the home into the canopy, preserving native flora and wildlife pathways below and establishing an occupiable plane hovering above the ground. The verticality of the steel frames references surrounding tree trunks and blends into the forest.

Read the full story at Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce