The brief was straightforward and the site was not: build a four-bedroom house on a shoreline lot that floods in a wet winter and bakes in a dry summer. Rather than raise the entire footprint on piers, the architects cantilevered the main living volume twenty-two feet past its last support, letting the ground floor stay open to storm surge while the house above stays dry and, more importantly, stays connected to the water view.

Structurally, the cantilever is carried by a pair of steel trusses buried in the floor plate, which let the architects keep the underside of the house flat and unbraced. Diagonal bracing would have been cheaper, but it would have chopped up the covered outdoor room underneath — the space the owners actually wanted most, since it's shaded, screened from wind, and eight feet from the water.

The flood line didn't limit the design — it became the reason the whole house lifts off the ground.

Inside, the plan is a single bar: kitchen and dining at the anchored end, living room cantilevered furthest out, bedrooms tucked along a spine that steps down half a level to follow the site. Windows run floor to ceiling on the water side and are almost entirely absent on the road side, which does double duty as privacy and as a thermal buffer against the afternoon sun.

The exterior is clad in a silvery-grey thermally modified pine that was chosen specifically to weather evenly rather than streak, since the roof has no gutters — water is meant to be seen sheeting off the eaves during a storm, not hidden. It's a small detail that says a lot about the project's attitude toward the site: work with the flooding, not around it.

A year on, the owners report the covered undercroft gets more use than any room upstairs. It's the kind of outcome that only shows up after a place has been lived in through a full season of weather, and it's the strongest argument for why the cantilever was worth the extra steel.