Longbranch
Key Peninsula, Washington
Longbranch is a single-storey house on the Key Peninsula in Puget Sound, Washington, built for a couple who had come to the area for decades and stayed in a small beach cabin. They bought a sloping 7.8 acre site with an ageing suburban-style house on it, took that and its retaining walls away, and asked for a home for themselves, "a bunch of foster dogs, a few horses, and visiting family and friends", built around two mature Douglas firs; the foundations cross above the roots on pin piles and grade beams. Eric Walter of MW Works: "The primary impulse with this site, like much of our work, was about the landscape and how the building would sit lightly within it".
The house is a central volume with two wings, 3,100 square feet with a detached garage, under green roofs, in dark-stained cedar and a concrete mix changed to bring out what the practice calls the natural and fluid nature of the material. The pier in this kitchen is one of two concrete piles that push through the glazed edge of the pavilion and double as fireplaces inside and out; the joinery is knotty oak and the fixtures rough-sawn. The practice's own summary: "Longbranch is a home designed to be overlooked".
MW Works
MW Works is a Seattle studio formed in 2007 by Steve Mongillo and Eric Walter and still a small office, working across architecture and interiors; here it also did the landscape design with Blacklotus Landscaping.
Architecture and interior design MW Works (@mw_works). Photography @poguephoto. Build @sparrowwoodworks. Landscape design MW Works and @blacklotuslandscaping. Seen via @thelocalproject.
The picture comes from this post on Instagram.
Researched September 2026. I credit each piece as carefully as I can; if you know more about this one, message me on Instagram.