SIGNAL

Outer Woods Retreat Center

Edmonds, WA

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Nature does not hurry

People: When a missionary group set out to create a health and wellness retreat outside of Edmonds, Washington, they identified a 40-acre wooded lot just outside of the city as their ideal site. Seeing a need for this kind of retreat in their community and beyond, the client strives to create places to rest and reset, and create spaciousness in an increasingly tightening world.

Architecture: Our team took on the design of cabins, large gathering and hospitality buildings, infrastructure, as well as the needs of a regenerative farm. Inspired by the idea of Scandinavian farmhouses, the client’s vision reflected clean, bright wood, bringing a warm and easy atmosphere. The client worked together with GCH Landscape Architects to design a master plan, allowing them to map the terrain and work with the natural flow of water to create a pond to anchor and unite site elements. Our team envisioned buildings and configurations to create an evolving experience from entering the site to becoming immersed further and further in another kind of world, coalesced around a different kind of connection. While our focus is on architecture, the starting place for a project of this kind is its basis in landscape. Even as the site will be yielding to structures, the structures relate to the land first and foremost as well-articulated environments made for people to connect back to the land. Every structure was designed to full Passive House standards, using as little energy as possible, and each structure is designed in collaboration with the site through orientation, shading, and windbreaks. The next step was to support the team in their capital planning and permitting; adding a legibility to the vision that could help the team bring more and more champions of the project on board.

Research: The retreat aims to incorporate multiple kinds of retreat, activation, and rest; ranging, for example, from yoga to pickleball, acupuncture to oxygen therapy, and from injury recovery to dark stays. A dark stay is an immersive type of retreat where all light is avoided, often underground. Our design challenge is to consider the needs of each of the different kinds of participants, and tailor an environment that feels supportive and responsive.

Part of the client’s commitment to wellness is the inclusion of a regenerative farm in the program. Unlike most farms, which are primarily extractive, regenerative farming is a holistic land-management practice aiming to enhance the biological function of the land by conserving and rehabilitating the land, and tailoring practices to local ecosystems and climates. By rebuilding soil organic matter and restoring soil biodiversity, regenerative farming contributes to counteracting climate change, sequestering carbon, and improving water resilience. In other words, regenerative farming seeks a reciprocal, beneficial relationship with the land. This programmatic inclusion makes sense from the perspective that our wellness is inevitably tied to the planet’s wellness.

The importance of place is foundational to our approach to practice at Signal, and we continue to give depth and breadth to this approach through education (including training with the Regenesis Institute). Our goal as architects is to understand the complexity of living systems and design approaches that honor that complexity. This approach prompted guiding questions in the design process for this project: How can we incorporate regenerative practices by designing structures that are of a hyper-locally reciprocal nature? How can we offer nature room to engage with the built environment, to benefit from it, and how can the built environment best benefit from nature?