The site faces southeast, opening onto a generous horizon: sweeping sea views, long hours of summer light, and the shifting spectacle of coastal storms arriving from the open water. Before imagining a building, the owners spent an entire summer camping there — learning the climate, the silences, the light. From that experience emerged the commission: to create a contemporary cabin where life could unfold simply, informally, and above all, outdoors.

Two modest structures, an open way of life

Laura Killam’s response is a composition of two modest structures arranged in an L-shape, embracing a sheltered courtyard: The Cabin, containing the living spaces and bedrooms — each with its own direct access from outside — and The Barn, a flexible volume housing a multi-use gathering area and a breezeway beneath a broad gabled roof.

Between the two, a particular way of living takes shape: a natural movement between indoors and out, amplified by wide porches, walkways, terraces, and deep roof overhangs that extend the life of the house well beyond its walls.

Adapting to the climate, celebrating the summer

Both volumes sit low, almost at ground level, softening the transition between meadow, deck and interior. Strategic shading elements — sloped roofs, pronounced eaves, open breezeways — allow the building to respond passively to heat and changing light. A generous outdoor shower and bathing area reinforces this direct relationship with nature, inviting a routine that blends with the sound of wind and the salt-laden air drifting in from the sea.

The primary aim was to create a place where summer can be lived fully — from long sunrise to warm evening.

Materials born from the landscape

To endure an exposed environment, materials were chosen with the serenity that true weathering requires. Both walls and roofs are clad in untreated, rough-sawn cedar boards that will naturally silver in the coastal air. Indoors, the same cedar appears in a soft grey finish, echoing the coastal landscape and offering a calm counterpoint to the bright light of the warmest months.

The furnishings, inspired by utilitarian farmstead forms, are robust, durable, understated—pieces designed to support a simple life, free from aesthetic tension or artifice.

The ideal refuge for a slower pace

Ranch Outpost is both a place for lively gatherings and a setting for quiet connection with the land around it. Its architecture proposes a different rhythm, one capable of slowing the days and allowing each gesture — sitting in the shade, walking barefoot, watching the movement of the sea — to regain its meaning.

In essence, the project embodies what its owners envisioned: an architecture that deepens the relationship with the landscape, one that accompanies life without prescribing it, one that allows summer to be experienced intensely, right up to the very edge of each day. A retreat that, like the cedar that wraps it, will evolve over time, finding in the patina of its own materiality the memory of every season.

Project: Ranch Outpost.
Location: Columbia Británica.
Completion: 2025.
Architecture: Laura Killam Arquitectura.
Lead Architect: Laura Killam.
Interior Design: Sophie Burke Design.
Photography: Andrew Latreille.
Source: Laura Killam Arquitectura.

Laura Killman Architecture

Laura Killam Architecture is an interdisciplinary design studio dedicated to enriching everyday life through the spaces it conceives. Specializing in bespoke homes set in the remote, untamed landscapes of the British Columbia coast, the studio pursues design solutions in which function and beauty intertwine, giving shape to an architecture that is serene, discreet and deeply rooted in place. Its work ranges from reading and defining a site in the heart of nature to planning access and infrastructure, always projecting with an eye attentive to both the present and the generations to come, and addressing architecture and interior design as an integrated whole.

LKA approaches each project as a conversation with the land. Its spaces seek to inhabit beauty —the beauty unfolding both within and beyond— and to respond meaningfully to those who will live in them. Each design is conceived to connect people with the natural environment through movement, revealing shifts in perspective, light and shadow, and offering a subtle balance between shelter and openness.

The studio is inspired by the spirit of Sea Ranch in California, the modernist tradition of the West Coast, and a profound commitment to preserving the landscape. Guided by this sensibility, it aspires to create buildings that quietly withdraw, allowing the power of the surroundings to speak first. Its ultimate aim is to shape spaces where one can breathe.

Originally from British Columbia —dividing her early life between Vancouver and a remote island off its coast— Laura Killam brings a multidisciplinary perspective forged as an architect, exhibition designer and film set designer. Her career has been shaped by the creation of spatial environments that are both innovative and meaningful.

Before founding Laura Killam Architecture in 2017, she worked as an architect at Public Architecture & Communication, a renowned Vancouver-based design firm. She previously served as Head of Exhibition Design and Production at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, and collaborated with Gehry Partners in Los Angeles on architecture and exhibition design projects.

Laura holds a Master of Architecture from Yale University —where she was nominated for the Feldman Prize— and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Concordia University in Montreal. She is a licensed architect in British Columbia and the State of Washington, and is a LEED AP.

Committed to education as well, she is an adjunct professor at the UBC School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. She has previously taught in the Architectural Science department at BCIT and in the Design Formation program at Langara College.

The architect Sebastián Machado, founder and director of Mano Arquitectura, designed a contemporary house typology with all the comforts, reinterpreting the vernacular architecture of this Pyrenean area with respectful eyes.

Machado created three different types of houses, in which views and natural light are the protagonists in each room; therefore, the entrance hall, on the lowest level, is a cosy and secluded space. As you go up, the double-height spaces, sloping ceilings and wide windows make living in this house a striking sensory experience.

The materials, the local natural slate in shades of grey and the natural wood, act as witnesses to the sun, wind, rain, heat and cold. They blend into their surroundings and show the passage of time with their marks of wear and tear, veins, rust, scratches, knots, porosity, colour and shine.

Project: Pleta Arriu
. Urbanización residencial con 38 viviendas
Location: Baqueira Beret, España

Architecture: Mano Arquitectura.

Architect: Sebastián Machado.
Customer: Grupo Avintia.
Promoter: Lantana Premium.
Renders: Bside Visuals.
Photography: Carlos Segura.
Surface: 17.029 m².
Finished: 2023.

Mano Arquitectura

Founded in 2004 by Sebastián Machado (Buenos Aires 1976), Mano Arquitectura designs in a careful and detailed way, with the clear influence of the place and the people who live there. They start from a deep knowledge of that habitat to design spaces with the love and passion for things that are well done and designed to last.

The Mano Arquitectura team is made up of professionals from various disciplines: urban planning, landscaping, architecture, engineering, interior design and furniture design are integrated into each project in a coherent way to express ideas that draw from the past but look to the future.

A look that seeks to integrate into the landscape in a subtle way and create a dialogue between people and the place, aware that human beings need all their senses to connect with nature and that each stone that is placed implies a responsibility towards the environment.

They carefully choose noble materials which, with the subtle use of light, create atmospheres that activate the senses and, with them, the memory. The smell of wood, the echo of stone, the feel of stucco: the materials are selected with today in mind, but also with their way of ageing, their way of accepting the passage of time, the patina caused by wear and tear and their ability to break and remain beautiful.

The works they design aim to extend the wisdom of the place by bringing new signs that enrich the environment. They aspire to a timeless architecture that is capable of creating new sensations.

Source: Mano Arquitectura.

The design follows the model of a large patio house, with a central garden-courtyard around which the five volumes are discreetly arranged. These buildings, at once open and secluded, form a private, tranquil retreat, where the omnipresent dune—both inside and out—and a restrained, consistent color palette evoke a sense of timelessness, as though these simple, fragile-looking homes had always belonged here, like the elder residents of this land.

At the highest point of the site, the main house rises. A central volume with a traditional pitched roof is flanked by two perpendicular wings, framing a generous living room and a spacious wooden porch that opens directly onto the central garden. This space becomes a place of shade and shelter—an architectural threshold between home and landscape.

Project: Casas da Encosta.
Location: Carvalhal. Grândola. Portugal.
Construction Dates: 2022 – 2023.
Architecture: SIA arquitectura.
Architects: Ana Cravinho, Inês Cordovil, Sofia Pinto Basto.
Collaborators: Ana Rita Martins, Matija Peric.
Engineering: Prodetail
.
Landscape Design: Greengest.
Construction: ECM Engenharia e Construção.
Gardens: Olhó Rosmaninho.
Built Area: 571 m².
Site Area: 2.491 m².
Photography: Francisco Nogueira
.

SIA arquitectura

“Founded in 2007, our practice began with the decision to inhabit a house. Not just to live in the city, but to seek out the sense of comfort we believe the city can offer. We chose the site, the street, the valley view, the program—and the risk of taking on the full process. Architecture requires decisions made from the conviction that small-scale, rigorous, and relevant actions naturally amplify over time. This is our moment, and our context. Listening is the practice of our profession.” —SIA arquitectura

Ana Cravinho

Born in Ponta Delgada in 1977, Ana graduated from the Technical University of Lisbon’s Faculty of Architecture in 2000. She worked at Sousa Oliveira Arquitectura e Urbanismo from 2000 to 2007, coordinating competitions including the Capitólio Theatre in Lisbon (1st prize) and the Law School at Universidade Nova de Lisboa. She collaborated with Manuel Aires Mateus during this period and has been working independently since 2002.

Inês Cordovil

Born in Lisbon in 1973, Inês graduated in 1998 from the Faculty of Architecture of UTL. From 1998 to 2007, she worked at Sousa Oliveira Arquitectura e Urbanismo, coordinating key projects such as the Lisbon Central Library and Municipal Archive and the Lisbon Stone Block residential building. From 2007 to 2016, she worked at Aires Mateus e Associados, where she led projects including the Alcântara Wastewater Treatment Plant, the Rua de São Bento 311residential building, and the AMA headquarters in Príncipe Real. She has maintained her own practice since 1998.

Sofia Pinto Basto

Born in Lisbon in 1970, Sofia earned her architecture degree in 1993 and worked as a project coordinator at Sousa Oliveira Arquitectura e Urbanismo until 2013. Her work includes the Universidade Nova de Lisboa Campus, the Cávado and Ave Polytechnic Campus, and the Lisbon Stone Block. In 1995, she completed a philosophy program at Universidade Nova de Lisboa.

Source: SIA arquitectura