Residence No. 1 in ink: a single-storey house under one steep monopitch roof, the tall corner glass, the basalt plinth, sagebrush and junipers.

Residence No. 1 built: charred cedar on a basalt plinth, one steep monopitch roof lined in oak, the tall corner glass in the evening sun, snow-capped mountains behind.

Story

We got tired of handing the drawings over.

Founded in Bend, Oregon, 2016. Twenty-six people. Eleven houses a year, and no plans to make it twelve.

The basswood model of Residence No. 1 on the studio table in early sun: one long volume under a single steep roof, on tracing paper with pencil sketches.

Two sets of hands on the same drawing: the architect marking the plan in pencil, the construction director pointing at the elevation.

2016

The first year we built one house and lost money on it.

Mara had spent eleven years in practice watching good drawings become mediocre buildings in the hands of contractors who had priced them optimistically and were now economising.

The fix seemed obvious and turned out to be very hard: hold the design and the build in the same company, so there is nobody to blame and nowhere to pass the cost.

The rule

Eleven houses a year, and we turn down more than we take.

11 Houses a year, by choice

We know what our site teams can carry. Twelve is where the Friday photographs get thin and the snagging list starts arriving after the move-in date.

It means we say no to work we would enjoy. It also means we have never missed a fixed price, and those two facts are the same fact.

The same build from the same spot, one photograph each Friday: the slab, the frame, the roof, the glass, then the finished house at dusk.

Drag the line, or use the arrow keys.

The habit

Every junction is drawn full size before it is built.

Not because it is traditional. Because a drawing at 1:1 is the only scale at which you cannot fool yourself about a detail that does not work.

The drawings live in a flat file in the studio and they are the reason our joiners stop asking questions after about week three.

1:20The flight: eight treads, one stringer, one slab edge.
1:5The top tread, and the bracket it sits on.
1:1Six millimetres of shadow gap, drawn at six millimetres.

The same junction as built: the white-oak tread stopping a shadow gap short of the lime plaster, the blackened steel bracket beneath it.

Studio

Twenty-six people. These three will be on your project.

Mara Rehn
Founder, principal architect
Eleven years in practice before starting Caldera. Does the first site walk on every project, still.
Aiko Tanaka
Designer, model maker
Noor Haddad
Interior designer

Jonas Oduya
Construction director
Twenty-two years on site. Holds the fixed price and is the phone number you are given at contract.
Caleb Ortiz
Site manager
Hugo Brennan
Landscape architect

Thea Almqvist
Project architect
Runs technical design and the full-size drawings. Ash Court is hers, including the argument about the tree.
Ines Varga
Head joiner
Ruth Whitaker
Cost manager