Project Name: Moksha House

Location: Portola Valley, California, United States

Design Team: SAW  

Floor Area: 724 m²

Completion: 2025

Photography: Joe Fletcher

Design Features: Perched above Portola Valley in Northern California, Moksha House is a meditation on grief, renewal, and the passage of time, designed by San Francisco studio SAW for a family marked by profound loss. Named after the Sanskrit concept of liberation from the cycle of life and death, the project carries its emotional weight directly into its architecture, making it one of the most deeply personal residential works to emerge from the American West Coast in recent memory.

The 724-square-metre main house descends gradually into the landscape, concealing itself on arrival before unfolding through a choreographed sequence of courtyards, cantilevered volumes, and panoramic views stretching toward San Francisco Bay. Orthogonal forms are subtly rotated to carve light and frame the topography, while Vierendeel steel trusses and mass timber glulam elements allow bold cantilevers to hover above the hillside with structural clarity.

What distinguishes Moksha most decisively is its material intelligence. Concrete cast with custom sawtooth board formwork creates softly shadowed surfaces, enriched with a high fly-ash content that reduces its carbon footprint while amplifying thermal mass. Above, reclaimed old-growth redwood sourced from wildfire and landslide-felled trees wraps the upper structure, silvering gracefully with weather exposure. Custom-milled blue-gum eucalyptus floors, salvaged from invasive species removal, add warmth and depth underfoot.

Each material was chosen not merely for performance but for its capacity to age, to absorb time, and to accumulate meaning. Completed in spring 2025, Moksha is ultimately a house that holds memory and invites renewal, its proceeds supporting cancer research at Stanford, a final gesture of generosity from the family who dreamed it into being.

Design Team: Founded in 2014 and headquartered in San Francisco, SAW（ Spiegel Aihara Workshop） is a transdisciplinary design practice operating at the convergence of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design. Led by founding principals Dan Spiegel, AIA, and Megumi Aihara, ASLA, PLA, both graduates of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, the studio brings an exceptional breadth of expertise to projects ranging in scale from bespoke residential commissions to complex urban interventions.

The firm's methodology is defined by its deliberate integration of architectural and landscape thinking from the earliest stages of design. Rather than treating building and terrain as separate disciplines, SAW identifies the latent opportunities that emerge at their intersection, engaging with site, material, and programme as inseparable constituents of spatial experience. This approach allows the practice to operate across multiple scales and timelines simultaneously, from the resolution of a material detail to the long-term ecological performance of a site.

Under the leadership of Spiegel and Aihara, alongside principals Dustin Stephens and associates Jeremy Ferguson and Avery Sell, the studio has developed a body of work recognised for its material rigour, contextual sensitivity, and commitment to design as a research-driven, collaborative process. SAW's projects reflect a sustained conviction that architecture and landscape, conceived in unity, hold genuine transformative potential for the communities they serve.