Tom Kundig's stone-clad refuge built into the bedrock of a San Juan Islands site.
In the spirit of using available on-site materials, we took a natural object from the site — the rock — and repurposed it in the building of this home. It's both a quarry and a structure. That's Kundig in his own words, and it captures the discipline most contractors don't have the patience for. Working with what's already on a site — using the rock that comes out of the excavation as the cladding that goes back into the structure — requires a hundred small decisions that take longer than ordering material from a supplier. The result is a house that reads as inevitable. As if it grew there.