Kinglet Perch begins with a practical decision: do not cut a road through the Ponderosa grove when the house can be carried from the ground already available. A flatter area lower on the property appeared easier to build on, but reaching it would have meant extending the driveway down the hillside and removing many of the trees the clients valued most. Instead, the driveway stays high, and the house occupies the narrow ground between the grove and the steep slope below.
Designed by Sanders Green Architecture, the plan moves between the different landscapes already present on the site. The bedroom wing sits alongside the Ponderosas, where the landscape is close: trunks, branches, shade and filtered light. In the bedrooms, the grove is the landscape. The north courtyard stays attached to the ground, while the kitchen, living room and patio extend beyond the trees toward the longer southern view down the Okanagan Valley. The plan does not reduce the property to a single view.
Where the hillside falls away, the house changes how it stands. The cantilever allows the living spaces to reach beyond the Ponderosa grove and occupy the position with the best southern view without filling the slope below with retaining walls, foundations or unnecessary rooms. A steel understructure carries the projecting floor back to rock, with exposed V-shaped struts supporting the outer volume. Like a small trestle, the structure carries the house across ground that was better left alone. The structure concentrates the intervention where it is needed and leaves more of the steep ground below intact.
For the architects, wildfire resilience mattered, but it was considered alongside cost, durability and long-term maintenance. White stucco became the primary exterior wall surface, with aluminum-framed glazing and weathering steel at the guards. Wood is concentrated inside the house and beneath protected soffits rather than used as exposed exterior wall cladding. That also reduces the need to refinish difficult-to-reach areas on the steep site. The material strategy is therefore practical as much as visual: the most exposed parts of the building are also the ones asked to require the least maintenance.
