A stone-clad refuge on a remote San Juan Islands site, oriented toward Puget Sound.
What makes this build defensible isn't the obvious choice — the stone cladding, the Puget Sound orientation, the cinematic glass — it's the site preparation invisible underneath. The geotechnical work, the drainage engineering, the rock placement on a steep forested slope. That's the part the photograph doesn't show. That's also what fails first when a builder cuts corners. Sites like these are where the difference between competence and craft becomes a thirty-year proposition.