The Tea Houses started years ago when I was still an intern at the office. The client first come to my boss for an extensive remodeling of his 6000 square feet house, then during the remodel, he told my boss his desire for a pavilion on his 2-acre property, a place where he could retreat into nature, away from the main house. The vision was realized as three tea houses.

In the spring of 2003, I was sent to Swatt Architects as an intern from my school’s internship program. At the time, the tea houses were still in their infant stage; various sketches and small scale design models had been made, the direction for the design was clear, but not everything was worked out. One of my assignments was to build a 1/4” scale model of the three tea houses from a set of schematic plans. As an intern, there was little expectation for me to deliver any actual work that could be used for the job. However, my diligence, my craftsmanship, and my meticulousness surprised my boss and won his attention. Although I didn’t participate in the later phases of the project, how I made the model had many influences on how the project was detailed and constructed in reality.

I studied the office’s previous work, and felt that I had an instinctive understanding of Robert Swatt’s work. So when he told me that the tea houses would be lifted off from the ground by concrete towers, I added a small detail to my model: scoring evenly spaced horizontal lines on the gray museum board to represent board-form concrete. He agreed, the tower should be board-formed. When he told me the tea house ‘boxes’ would be steel framed, I took the liberty and decided that these would be I-beams, and expressed them in the construction of the ‘box.’ Swatt agreed, expressing the profile of the I-beam tells one how tea houses were made. My careful construction of the glazing on the model with plexiglass became the minimalist frameless look that the actual construction was striving for. This model was one of the reasons that got me my first job right after graduation.