Living

Awarded the National Association of Home Builders 2024 Home of the Year, our design celebrates the beauty of impermanence and imperfection.

The Burch Creek Residence incorporates elements of ‘mono no aware’ (a Japanese aesthetic based in the fleeting and varying beauty of nature) and ‘wabi-sabi’ (an aesthetic embracing concepts of impermanence, imperfection and incompleteness).

Celebrating the movement of water, the home introduces itself as a layered experience. Residents and guests travel through a sequence of carefully composed scales of space and shifting lighting conditions towards the cascading staircase, as each space focuses the eye on the creek bed below.

EDA organized the compact floor plan around a central courtyard to capture both expansive regional and intimate landscaped views. A central “brahmasthan,” inspired by Vedic architecture, acts as the spatial nexus of the home, enhancing both horizontal and vertical connectivity.

Consistent with EDA’s ethos of modernism, the open floor plan is articulated by low cubes for storage or high cubes erupting through the roof’s horizontal plane to define the central hearth and chimney. Within the open plan we used materials such as handmade bricks and artist-designed fixtures to define intimate spaces within the home.

EDA collaborated with Cannon Design to design a nationally-acclaimed transformational, educational live-work experience for student entrepreneurs, innovators and creators at the University of Utah. The LEED Gold design expresses and encourages the live-work entrepreneurial spirit through solutions such as the 20,000 SF Neeleman Hangar innovation space on the ground floor, 15,000 SF of garage-style “maker” spaces on all five levels and a variety of housing options for its 400 student residents. The solution, inspired by the turn-of-the-century converted industrial spaces, includes a building’s flexible grid system allows the University to reconfigure rooms and expand the innovation hangar as students’ needs change. The space enables entrepreneurship, facilitating connection between students of different disciplines to collaborate on products and companies throughout their residence.