Radcliffe The Sea House

The Sea House on Radcliffe Avenue, designed by Les Eerkes during his tenure at Olson Kundig, is one of West Vancouver’s most technically demanding and quietly poetic coastal residences. Rather than being placed upon the site, the structure is drawn out of the granite itself, its massing aligned to the natural contours with a level of architectural restraint that allows the land to guide the architecture.

Construction required an unusually complex logistical strategy. Major components arrived by barge, were craned over the bluff, and installed in a pre-choreographed sequence dictated entirely by the cliffside terrain. Every movement, tolerance, and connection had to be planned with precision, reflecting the home’s underlying structural intelligence and the constraints of building on exposed coastal rock.

Light, water, and stone form the home’s elemental vocabulary. A reflecting pool gathers and redirects daylight deep into the interior, creating a shifting interplay of brightness and shadow throughout the day. The ocean-facing façade becomes a calibrated plane of glass, engineered for marine exposure and positioned to capture the full atmospheric range of the coastline mist, storms, horizon light, and the rhythmic movement of the tide.

Material junctions in steel, stone, and wood are executed with disciplined tolerances, each expressing the craftsmanship required to build in a location where geology and weather are constant forces. The result is a residence where technical ingenuity and elemental simplicity meet, shaped entirely by the land, the ocean, and the architect’s measured hand.