Architecture Wednesday: Okada Marshall House

If you want to get away, and yet still live in comfortable luxury, the Okada Marshall House in Sooke, Canada might be just the ticket.

The house is a sort of tilted H-shape, wrapping its exterior walls around two courtyards with all the doors and windows of the home either facing the rocky moss-covered courtyard or the ocean.

And while the exterior is made up of thin wooden slats and pillars, it appears quite solid and a part of the landscape. The slats help create a screen around the inner courtyards, providing privacy without blocking out the sunlight.

Inside and outside, facades, furnishings, and finishes are all created from wood supplied by Shou-sugi; the wood is hand charred according to ancient Japanese techniques that ensure it will never rot. This wood is perfect for a damp and wooded Canadian seaside location.

The layout inside the home is as intriguing, featuring sharp angles and corners you see from the outside because the owners wanted a home without stairs; the social spaces are stretched wide to lead directly into sloping hallways that curve and lead gently from floor to floor. Elongated halls give the house a feeling of massive expansiveness and also provide a quiet separation of space that actually cancels noise quite effectively without making rooms feel cut off from one another.

It also helps make the house feel much larger that it actually is, with the angles and curves specifically placed—even though they appear random—to mimic and work with the rocky topography of the site. The angles also helped to better place windows to take in all the views of Vancouver Island’s west coast.

One area of the house relied less on wood; the master bathroom was finished in Japanese black tile to create a balance of light. No matter how grey the seaside skies are, the outside will always appear brighter than the dark, black tiles that bathroom. That view alone is enough to make anyone’s day start brighter

I love that it angles and turns and curves, and everywhere you look is a beautiful view, either of a private courtyard, or the ocean beyond the trees.

I feel more Zen already.

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D'Arcy Jones Architects