The idea behind House to the Beach is simple yet ambitious: views from the bluff and an intimate relationship with Lake Michigan. What brings together these two different conditions, and what made the project feasible in the first place, is the architectural concept of the house itself.

The easiest solution would have been to build the house on good fill, close to the busy street and uncomfortably near the gigantic temple. Moving the house closer to the edge of the bluff would have required an enormous amount of soil removal, replacement, and compaction—an expensive prospect given the depth of 30 feet.

By splitting the program and burying half the house on the bluff, we were able to stretch the structure out over the entire property, replacing the fill with living space. As one descends the processional, light filled stairway, private spaces remain hidden from the main circulation, while public living and dining rooms reveal themselves on the way down to the beach, allowing for more diverse and more specialized relationships of the building to the environment.