This speculative Alaskan Retreat provides a playful twist on the Wrightian principle of a central hearth. Particular emphasis was placed on the relationship between hearth and window, with porthole windows serving as horizontal views towards the mountains and the upward reaching hearth looking towards the sky. The mushroom-like treehouse structure is informed both by the shape of the hearth and my own experiences hiking the Tongass Rainforest in Southeast Alaska. I wanted this open, vertically-oriented retreat to mimic the smoke ascending the hearth, making the home itself a kind of living tree in the wilderness of the Alaskan landscape.

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Designed in my isolation during the Covid-19 pandemic, this imaginative space became a comfort to me as I could imagine myself occupying it during a cold Alaskan winter. Though isolated in its site context, the home itself can serve as a central social hub and is designed without typical room partitions or hierarchy of living space associated with typical single-family homes.