Daylight is the cheapest material on any project, and the easiest to get wrong. Before we choose a single finish, we run sun studies against the site to understand how light moves through the day and across the seasons.

On the Alaska Ridge Residence, this meant orienting the main living volume almost twenty degrees off the obvious axis, trading a slightly less direct view for six extra weeks of usable low-angle winter light in the main room.

The lesson repeats on nearly every project: the "correct" orientation on paper is rarely the one that actually makes a room feel good to be in for the twenty years after it's built.