The Suspension House is one of those projects you don’t see often ? it’s like a perfectly executed sculpture suspended in nature that someone gets to live in. The site-specific house is a remodel designed by San Francisco-based Fougeron Architecture that hovers above a creek between two California hills. There’s even a waterfall in the backyard. The goal was to strengthen the home’s connection to the surrounding environment of rocky hillsides and the water that runs underneath it.

Due to it no longer being legal to build homes over creeks in this part of California, there were strict guidelines in place for how to build off of the existing structure. The new laws required that the new structure had to follow the exact outline of the original house and decks.
In lieu of disturbing the creek below, they built a new structural system into the bedrock of the hills, which allowed the house to be completely suspended over the water.

The new design now features floor-to-ceiling windows, floating staircases, see-through flooring, and open outdoor spaces, allowing views of the water from both sides of the house. Fougeron’s remodel keeps 50% of the original wood structure by utilizing a steel frame beneath the original floors and then anchoring the structure to the hillsides. That allowed them to remove the supporting columns from the creek bed.

The first two floors are kept like the original house in structure and orientation, while the top fl...