At the center of the composition, a mature canopy tree, preserved through the design process rather than cleared for it, anchors a gravel-and-stone courtyard. A koi-filled reflecting pool runs beneath the entry breezeway, its still surface catching the curved, cantilevered timber roof forms above. These roofs are the architecture’s clearest signature: hand-shaped, deeply overhanging, and cut to throw long bands of shadow across the stone below through the middle of the day. Where hard geometry might have announced itself, Stonewater chooses a soft, sweeping line instead, built up in wood and repeated pavilion to pavilion until it reads as one continuous roofscape, low enough to keep each courtyard human in scale.
Hand-hewn stone grounds every elevation, its texture varying enough, rough in places, worked smooth in others, that the material reads as quarried rather than applied. It is the one constant that ties several distinct volumes into a single compound, carried from the exterior cladding straight through the covered walkways that link every pavilion. Those walkways do the real structural work of the plan: they let a resident move from the entry courtyard to the pool terrace to the outdoor kitchen without stepping into direct sun or committing to a single interior route.
The sequence opens, beyond the entry courtyard, onto a resort-scaled pool with an integrated spa and sun shelf, deep enough in plan to hold an open-air lounge, a dining terrace, and an outdoor kitchen as three distinct rooms rather than one undifferentiated deck. Tropical planting is used sparingly and specifically, framing sightlines between pavilions rather than screening them, so the stone and timber stay legible as the primary material story.
Currently in Design Development, Stonewater is conceived as a single-family residence built around the idea that a large house need not present itself as one building. Split across pavilions and stitched together by water and shade, the plan lets scale disappear into sequence, each courtyard sized to be inhabited on its own terms before the next one opens.
