Why we build only one house a year

Introduction

We are asked often why Obsidian doesn’t build more. The honest answer is that one house a year is the most we can build without starting to repeat ourselves.

The Discipline

Every residence we’ve built is different because every site, client, and light condition is different. Scaling a studio usually means standardizing — a floor plan, a material palette, a process that repeats efficiently. We’ve watched that happen to studios we admired, and watched their houses start to look like each other.

One house a year means every decision gets our full attention: the concrete mix, the solstice orientation, the sixty-year-old cedar sourced for a single stair. None of that survives a faster pace.

The Trade

We turn down more commissions than we accept. That’s the real cost of this pace, and we’ve made peace with it. What we protect in exchange is a body of work where no two houses could be mistaken for one another.

Fourteen residences in nine years. We plan to keep it that way.