A horizontal division of the building’s single volume—with the upper, glass- and wood-clad section wrapped in a cedar-slat screen—dissolves the structure’s height, so Lantern House reads as shorter—and, in its simplicity, more humble—than its neighbors; at the same time, its symmetry and visually massive ground floor give it a distinctive gravitas.

The house’s foreground treatment also departs from the neighborhood norm, with informal, textured plantings reminiscent of a forest glade. Among them, three huge roughly hewn blocks of granite complement the architecture’s monumentality and introduce an intermediate scale that connects the house and its ground. In combination with a mature oak in front of the 50-foot lot (wider than the neighborhood’s typical 33-foot lot), the effect is refreshing, like a pocket park along the lawn-lined street.

“This vernacular that we see around us is colonialist, so it’s not something that we as a practice feel bound to replicate,” says Michael Leckie, founding principal at Leckie Studio, a 2022 Design Vanguard. “Instead, we opt to respond to context through scale, proportion, and materiality.” With Lantern House, he says, “the idea is to communicate a sensibility that is less precious, more natural, and, with its acceptance of materials’ weathering, more embracing of a kind of entropic beauty.”

Inside, the house takes a similarly critical approach to domesticity, investigating from first principles the spatial configuration and characteristics that will best support the residents’ daily life. The result is a calm and cloistered set of essential spaces, executed in authentic materials and neutral tones, and washed in soft light. With the wood-framed structure’s footprint measuring just 1,355 square feet, and the front and sides of its nine-square grid occupied by ancillary functions, the interior is smaller and more intimate than photography may convey.

The entry consists of a two-room sequence: first, a vestibule daylit only by the open door and, second, to the right, an anteroom—“mudroom” seeming too prosaic a term—where sidelight from a narrow window throws a simple bench and lime-washed wall into chiaroscuro. Dark and quiet, this pair of spaces forms an experiential threshold, moderating the sensory transition between the outside world and the sanctuary within.

A second turn and one arrives at the center of the house, open in plan and subdivided in section. A polished concrete slab on grade steps down the site’s gentle slope, the first level defining a “sunken” living room and, the next level, a kitchen zone, behind which full-height glazing opens to the garden beyond. At one end of the kitchen level, a millwork-encased dining alcove with built-in benches and a dropped ceiling forms a spatial eddy that is apart from, and yet still part of, the main space.

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The slab on grade follows the site’s gentle slope, with the first step down defining the living room (1) and the second the kitchen (2) with an adjacent dining alcove (3). Photos © Ema Peter, click to enlarge.

Above the living room, a 9-foot-square light well, a full story high, bathes the central space in the shifting brightness of the sky. The opening’s wooden-grillwork sides diffuse this illumination and also soften the ground floor’s acoustics, which that level’s predominantly hard and planar surfaces might otherwise have left too bright for comfort.

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The living room (4) is at the center of the house, directly below the light well (5). Photos © Ema Peter

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From one corner of the living room, a clerestory-lit stair winds up to the second floor, where shadows from the grillwork and refracted light from a rim of mirror beneath the skylight create moments of interest on the lime-washed walls.

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A stair winds to the second floor (6) from a corner of the living room next to an office (7). A hidden skylight illuminates a tiled shower (8). Photos © Ema Peter

High windowsills provide all three bedrooms with privacy from nearby neighbors, while generous ceiling and door heights give the rooms, though modestly sized, a sense of majesty and calm. Even though the principal bedroom faces the street, the view from the bed consists entirely of a seasonally changing canopy of oak.

Two bathrooms on this level continue the house’s subtle plays of light and texture. The architect’s appreciation for Jun'ichirō Tanizaki’s essay “In Praise of Shadows” and Peter Zumthor’s Therme Vals are especially evident in the use of concealed apertures to send whispers of light across the bathing areas’ tiled walls. Details here are representative of the thorough approach throughout, with fine adjustments to wall thicknesses to let tiles remain whole, custom towel hooks aligned within the grout, and door strikes designed in-house to work with the frameless openings.

“I often suggest to the team that the true merit of a work of architecture should be judged by its worst detail rather than its best,” Leckie says—a level of care that, in Lantern House, has produced a place of coherence and serenity, a sanctuary in the city.

Image courtesy Leckie Studio Architecture + Design, click to enlarge.

Image courtesy Leckie Studio Architecture + Design, click to enlarge.