This house is perched high on a grassy hill, which looks southerly down Lake Washington, including views of the Cascades, Kirkland, Bellevue, Mount Rainier, and Seattle. Commonly owned horse pastures surround the circular building lot. The house was designed to carefully frame the various views, send out protective arms to screen the south-facing courtyard from the surrounding neighbors, and to take advantage of the changing sunlight of the day. The house consists primarily of building wings projecting from a main core, in which the end of each projection is as glassy as possible.

The owners brought their admiration for the historic work of H.H. Richardson to the design table. Richardson's work is typified by the use of a careful interplay of solid masses, voids within these masses, and timeless, durable materials. The resulting home is clad in basalt rubble, cedar shingle, slate roofing, bluestone terraces, yellow cedar windows and doors. The same approach to materials permeates the interior of the home, in the form of moldings milled from reclaimed yellow cedar, ash floors, yellow cedar and figured sycamore doors, stone countertops, maple casework, and spruce ceilings.

The house is organized as a series discreet spaces, connected via visual axes, which ultimately lead to a building exit or framed view. On the lower floor, which is cut deeply into the hillside, the house is penetrated by a room-sized passageway, which connects the north end of the site to the courtyard, known as the "arcade". The arcade serves as a transitional, indoor and outdoor space. One is lead down to this space by a series of stone bridges spanning a cascade of water, which reappears as a running stream on the other side of the arcade, culminating in a deep-pooled water garden.