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CANOPY: An Exploration of Light as Material
Designed for Marcella Phase 5, Lot 313 

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Main Level Area:    4,880-livable sf
Lower Level Area:  9,675-livable sf
Total Livable Area: 14,555 SF

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Excludes Non-Livable Square Footage of Utility Rooms and 4-Car Garage

                        

CANOPY: An Exploration of Light as Material

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CANOPY began with one question: What if this home was designed with the human experiences, stories, and memories imagined within it at the forefront, rather than the spaces it needed to contain them?

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With experience at the forefront, every movement and transition becomes intentional. Beginning at the tunneled, covered arrival to the sheltered landscapes between; from ever-changing light filtering above, through, and beneath the architecture to moments of gathering, retreat, exploration, play, and discovery. From this exploration, CANOPY emerged as both an idea and an organizing principle: the lens through which the home and the spaces between are experienced.

 

The site became an active participant in shaping that experience. Surrounded by extraordinary views toward the mountains, water, and golf course, the home responds not with a singular orientation, but through a series of shifting relationships to its surroundings. The architecture turns, opens, frames, shelters, and reveals, allowing views and landscape to be encountered differently as one moves through the home. The result is not a single moment of arrival or one commanding view, but a sequence of experiences that unfold over time.

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The three levels establish distinctly different relationships not only with the land, but with the rhythms of home life. The upper level is conceived as a complete home for the owners' everyday experience. The mudroom, scullery, powder room, kitchen, great room, primary suite, and office are all contained on this level, allowing daily life to unfold comfortably and intuitively. Elevated within the landscape and oriented toward significant views, it becomes an intimate home within the larger home.

 

When children, grandchildren, extended family, and friends arrive, the house expands with them. The lower level accommodates four additional bedroom suites alongside media and entertainment spaces, fitness and spa environments, a coffee/tea room and garden-prep space. This creates a second layer of life within the home, one that allows generations to come together for extended periods while preserving opportunities for independence, privacy, and restoration.

 

Between these two worlds lies the experiential heart of CANOPY.
Here, architecture gives way to landscape. An expansive garden level occupies the space between the upper and lower volumes, allowing gardens, vegetation, water, pathways, and places of pause to extend into and through the architecture. It becomes common ground, a place where generations intersect and where the distinction between building and landscape intentionally begins to disappear.

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It is also where play and discovery become fundamental to the experience of the home. Paths need not always provide the most direct route. Bridges, stairs, gardens, play netting, water, changing grades, and unexpected openings invite wandering and curiosity. Moments of compression give way to release. Views are concealed and rediscovered. A child may experience these spaces through play while an adult encounters the same place as an opportunity to pause, explore, or reconnect with nature and themselves. CANOPY is designed to preserve that sense of curiosity across generations, to create a home that can continue to reveal something new overtime and throughout the seasons.

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Light becomes a fundamental characteristic of this playful design. Rather than treating daylight simply as illumination, CANOPY explores light as material. Skylights, trellises, screens, mesh, vegetation, and overhead structures filter sunlight and cast evolving patterns of light and shadow. As the sun moves and the seasons change, so does the experience of the architecture.

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Throughout the home, openness is balanced with refuge, movement with pause, and gathering with retreat. These contrasts echo the experience of standing beneath a natural canopy, protected while remaining connected to everything beyond it.

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Ultimately, CANOPY is designed to contract and expand with the life of a family: intimate when occupied by one or two, expansive when children, grandchildren, family, and friends return. Its ambition is not simply to create a beautiful home, but to create the setting for the experiences that become part of a family's story and memories of quiet mornings, shared meals, exploration, restoration, unexpected discoveries, play, celebrations, and time together\throughout every season of life and the ever-changing seasons of the landscape.

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The architecture provides the framework. The life experienced beneath the canopy gives it meaning and heart to the home.