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An Orcas Island Home Was the Dream. Here’s How They Made It a Reality.
The small house in Washington was designed to sit lightly on the land: It touches the ground in only six places, and they didn’t cut down a single tree.
A home should be a place where you can welcome your extended family — at least that’s what Leah Martin and Vikram Prakash thought. But while they loved entertaining at the house they shared with their three children, the experience wasn’t quite what they had in mind.
“What happens is that when everybody comes to our Seattle home, our lives are so hectic we don’t really get to spend time together in the way we would really love to,” Ms. Martin said. “We had been thinking for a long time that it would be so nice to find a place where we could all truly decompress as a family.”
The obvious solution, they decided, was to build a second home in a rural spot outside the city. And because they are both architects — Ms. Martin, 53, is a principal of the architecture firm Allied8; Mr. Prakash, 60, is a professor of architecture at the University of Washington — they relished the idea of designing their own home.
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