Featured Project of the Month: The Clear Creek Residence

The Clear Creek residence sits at the heart of Clear Creek Tahoe on the Eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The homesite is perched upon a ridge with striking views north over the Clear Creek golf course and south along the eastern Sierra of the Carson Valley.

The ELD was challenged with preserving and enhancing these grand views, providing strategic privacy for the homeowner, while creating usable outdoor spaces and framing key aspects of the contemporary architecture.

The entry to the home makes a profound statement with floating steps traversing an aspen stand with shade loving understory plantings. The entry features terraced concrete retaining boxes, framing the natural layering of plantings in mass. The white trunks of the aspen trees contrast the dark building facade, and the foliage serves as an everchanging seasonal display, with bright green spring foliage turning striking yellow in the fall.

The landscape design takes a transitional approach, adopting formal and contemporary planting patterns and massings, interjected with naturalized outcroppings and stands of aspen trees. A particularly special view of Jack’s Peak was utilized with a secluded hammock space.

The planting disperses away from the house developing a smooth transition from the surrounding forest to the architecture. Plantings closest to the naturalized areas takes on a more native palette of manzanita, spirea, and sage.

Architect: sagemodern

Landscape Architect: Evergreen Landscape Development

General Contractor: sagemodern

Landscape Contractor: Evergreen Landscape Development