Skyline
Deck

The clients had a beautiful backyard they almost never used. The grade dropped sharply behind the house, leaving the rear doors opening onto a short, awkward step-down and a slope that turned to mud every winter. They wanted a level place to gather — somewhere to eat dinner outside, let the kids play within sight, and sit by a fire once the sun dropped behind the hills.

Our answer was an elevated deck that extends the main floor of the house straight out into the canopy. We built the structure in ipe — a dense tropical hardwood that weathers without rotting and only deepens in color over the years. The boards are run on the diagonal off the house to draw the eye outward toward the view, and every fastener is hidden so the surface reads as one continuous plane of grain.

"We went from a yard we avoided to the place the whole family ends up every single evening."

Privacy was the harder problem. The lot sits close to its neighbors, so we designed a set of vertical slatted screens — stepped at the top like a small skyline — that block sightlines without closing the deck off from the light or the trees. The same detail carries up into the pergola overhead, which casts a moving pattern of shadow across the deck through the afternoon and supports a retractable shade for the hottest weeks of the year.

At the center we set a low gas fire feature flanked by a built-in lounge, sized so the family could be out there in a sweater well into the fall. The project ran on schedule and on budget — and the ipe, left to silver naturally or kept warm with annual oil, is built to outlast everything around it.