When Carol Soucek King set out to build, she wasn't after something grand or imposing. She wanted a refuge that belonged to the land — hidden away in nature, more wild than refined. She found it on an unlikely but perfect spot: the last privately owned land in the Arroyo Seco, tucked beneath the great bridges, on the very ground where stone for the Colorado Street Bridge was quarried.

She was insistent on one thing above all — the house would lie low and entirely horizontal, holding to the ground rather than rising above it. Buff & Hensman answered with a house built from the inside out, its long horizontal lines settling into the hillside until architecture and arroyo became a single, symbiotic whole — close to the earth, quiet, and open to the wider world the Kings were helping bring closer.