Ridgeline Studio

Project facts

Nine hundred square feet for a painter, set just below a ridge so it never appears on the skyline from the valley floor.

The client paints large canvases and needed north light, storage for forty years of work, and somewhere to sleep two nights a week. She also asked, firmly, that the building not be visible from her neighbour's pasture.

We set it eleven feet below the ridge on the northern slope. From the valley you see nothing; from the building you see everything. The roof takes the pitch of the hill behind it so the silhouette reads as ground rather than object.

Inside it is one room. A twenty-two foot north window does the work the brief asked for. A low wall of storage divides painting from sleeping without reaching the ceiling, so the volume stays whole and the light crosses the entire plan.

It was built in fourteen weeks by two brothers from Santa Fe, Tennessee, using a timber frame and a standing-seam roof. There is no air conditioning. The building is oriented, shaded and vented to do without it, and after two summers it has.