This is the story of a yearlong weekend project. The initial intention was to design-build a 100 square foot sauna in the Central District neighborhood in Seattle, WA. The roof design, which ended up driving the design of the building, was inspired by two salvaged 24 foot old growth beams serendipitously found at a secondhand building material store in the Summer of 2018. In February 2019, a dinner conversation with two old architecture friends convinced us to try the unthinkable: to divert from traditional carpentry and place the ridge beam at a diagonal, rather than what is normally placed perpendicular to the top plate. As we departed from the typical gable and valley roof framing carpentry on this self-imposed adventure, our simple design gesture procured an incredible number of construction challenges and discoveries. The most immediate discovery made us appreciate, in retrospect, how gable roof systems work so easily and effortlessly. The more profound discovery we made was compound angles.

Compound angles are not unfamiliar to carpenters who use them regularly on dormer and valley roof construction. Producing compound angles on a piece of wood essentially means that a piece of wood has two sides, side A and side B, which will have to be cut at different angles and at different measurements. This added complication required us diagram, test and prototype through the winter of 2019.

Why embark on such a project? For our budding studio each project is a means to question our certainties so we can grow to be a little smarter and humble. Ultimately, a sauna is a place of communal ceremony during which we come together and communicate with the skies above us. What a better place to celebrate what lays beyond than by showing the extraordinary beauty and intricacies of two chunks of millennial trees?

Design-build by Isaac Backus and Juliette Dubroca

Assistance from Matt Fujimoto, John Greendeer Lee and Keoni Akina