Design Reads: Explore Tom Kundig’s Residential Projects

Tom Kundig: Complete Houses

By Tom Kundig,
edited by Dung Ngo
New York and London:
Monacelli, $100
600 pages, 970 color illustrations

When Tom Kundig arrived as an undergrad at the University of Washington, before switching to environmental design, followed by a master’s of architecture, he was there to study geophysics. It’s not all that surprising if you’re familiar with the Olson Kundig cofounder and Interior Design Hall of Famer’s work, which is imbued with a reverence for the natural world. Complete Houses, Kundig’s fifth monograph, focuses on his career as a solo practitioner, compiling the nearly 500 residential projects in his oeuvre to date.

Spotlighting 38 projects across five sections, each introduced through an interview with editor Dung Ngo and a gallery of sketches, many of the houses feature Kundig’s signature detail: hand cranks that operate massive doors or even entire walls that open to the outside, yet are easy enough to turn, thanks to careful counterbalancing, that a child can do it. Another common element is remote, rugged sites, a preference informed by the architect’s lifelong love of mountaineering. One featured here is a steep, forested plot in rural Washington on which he built a house with a detached studio mounted on railroad tracks, which, when rolled away, gives the resident a chance to “commute” to the office, separating play and work. Another project encapsulates Kundig’s dedication to building with, rather than against, the landscape, the aptly named treehouse in Costa Rica, its core structure and interior finishes made of teak harvested just feet from the site. (Since teak trees are invasive to the country, cutting them down actually provides a benefit to the local ecology.)

The volume—the first of two, the later of which, due out in 2027, will focus on Kundig’s commercial and institutional projects—ends with a chronology of all his residential projects from 1986-2024, with more than 100 having been completed in the last two years of that timeline alone. Though this record is complete for now, Kundig shows no signs of slowing down.