A glass-aluminum-and-cedar house
at the valley's northern edge.

8495 Franz Valley School Road sits on twenty-two acres at the northern edge of the valley, between two low knolls where a seasonal creek runs below the building site and the Pepperwood Preserve, three thousand acres of it, forms an unbroken wilderness to the north.

Completed in 2020, the residence came from a renown team of companies: Signum Architecture, the Seattle prefab builders Method Homes, the landscape studio Terremoto, and interior designer Alison Damonte. The exterior is concrete, clear cedar, and Japanese shou sugi ban, the charred-wood siding that resists fire and weather, set against aluminum-framed walls of glass beneath a low parapet roof. It was built to the wildland-fire standard, in materials chosen to last.

The idea running through it is connection of the structural kind. The main living wall folds away entirely, merging the interior with a stone terrace, a heated pool, and the forested hills beyond. Five bedrooms and five and a half baths, an outdoor kitchen, and a tennis court complete a house that Dwell featured for exactly this resolve.

Represented as a co-listing, the house sold for $4,550,000. It is the rare new house in the valley that reads as architecture rather than inventory, conceived whole and finished that way.