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"View Slideshow\n\nThe Tahoe Regional Planning Agency imposes uncommonly stringent environmental and design restrictions on new construction\u2014a fact that has contributed to the preservation of one of the country's marquee lake districts and to no small degree of hand-wringing among architects. Roderick Ashley, for one, was told that the modest bipartite building he envisioned for an Incline Village, Nevada, lakefront site would take at least a year and most likely several trips back to the drawing board to gain approval.\n\nBut that didn't happen. \"We sailed right through,\" says Ashley, a principal of TVA Architects in Portland, Oregon, \"because, while the design is so non-Tahoe, the construction so non-Tahoe, the scale is right. Our intention was right. We weren't pushing the boundaries or asking for concessions\u2014we took a minimal approach in differentiating the building from the landscape, which in the end is what everyone wants to protect.\"\n\nThe graveled garden is a stunning all\u00E9e lined with Swedish aspens and bridged by a slatted-wood boardwalk, the compound's connective spine.\n\nA retreat consisting of two mirror-image structures housing a guest residence and a studiolibrary, and mediated by a graveled sculpture garden, the project was commissioned by a philanthropist to honor her late husband. An \"inward\" composition of 4,500 square feet of enclosed space designed to foster thought and reflection (\"The conversation,\" Ashley says, \"is back and forth between the two buildings\"), it nevertheless embraces its forested site and the fabled Sierra Nevada-ringed, cobalt-blue lake it overlooks.\n\nThe north shore is a high-premium alpine region where steel-and-concrete construction is an anomaly, as are flat roofs (even though the snow load is less than in other parts of the area). Barely visible from the water or the street, the small compound exists as Lake Tahoe's secret pocket of modernism\u2014a combination of rigor, understatement and transparency that might well have been a model for this climate had modern technology and sensibilities been factors in past eras.\n\nThe two buildings are primarily board-formed (a nod to rusticity), poured-in-place concrete, which appears as an extension of the decomposed-granite soil. Mahogany siding clads the nonbearing walls. Roofs are mahogany-and-steel-faced concrete slabs supported by exposed-steel columns on the interior and a single steel column at each exterior (echoing the verticality of the pines). Floor-to-ceiling glass walls establish the overall, and defining, indoor-outdoor character.\n\nEssentially one room for entertaining and sleeping\u2014with custom furnishings designed by the owner\u2014the guest residence contains as well a kitchen, a bath and a walk-in closetdressing area. Completing the plan are a garage and storage for groundskeeping equipment. A Howard Hodgkin monotype commands the main living space as it visually balances, when seen from the graveled garden, the similarly scaled artworks outside.\n\nAcross the long stretch of gravel lie the library and the studio, which doubles as a conference room and is adjoined by a butler's pantry and a powder room. A walkway leads down to the sandy beach. With both buildings, concrete encases the more utilitarian parts not requiring natural light or view exposure, while the glazed rooms extend, seemingly suspended, toward the lake. Deep roof overhangs protect from sun and snow.\n\nFlooring is a concrete aggregate (except in the minor spaces, where it is black granite) from the nearby Truckee River, buffed on the interiors and left rough for the terraces. \"The play of concrete is very subtle,\" Ashley observes. \"It goes from polished and refined inside to a fractured aggregate as it marches out to the garden.\"\n\nThe landscaping was one of the last projects by the late Robert Murase, a noted Portland landscape architect who, having studied with Isamu Noguchi, honored the ancient Japanese tradition of positioning stones within nature. Carved stone works by Murase and his son Scott, along with their centrally placed arrangement of rusted steel and white marble, are prominent. Lee Kelly's site-specific works add to the collection, predominantly his Cor-Ten steel sculpture that gives the east side, says Ashley, \"both a functional barrier and an abstracted opening to the view.\"\n\nThe elder Murase's graveled garden is a stunning all\u00E9e lined with Swedish aspens and bridged by a slatted-wood boardwalk, the compound's connective spine. An essential aspect of the architectural dynamic, the garden is luxuriously spare; however, only three trees were removed from the property and more than 150 new ones planted upon completion of construction. Native plants have been reestablished and left to intrude into the gravel, a ground cover that minimizes soil erosion in the wet months. (Other sustainable elements include the disposal of storm water on-site, radiant-heated floors and a high level of insulation.)\n\n\"In order to remain a national treasure, the visual quality of the built environment and the way it fits into the natural setting becomes critical,\" reads the Tahoe Region-al Planning Agency's design standards and guidelines\u2014as if to foretell the addition of this smart, simple building, so light on the land and rich in contextual detail."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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