Philosophy

While bringing life to our client's dreams — and making an artistic contribution to the built environment — we also know our structures must function well ergonomically and honor place. These performance goals inform our mission to fully understand a client’s design program via intensive, iterative, conceptual design work, and their building site via multiple, pre-design, visits.

Connecting interior spaces to the site and natural light is vital to our work. Thoughtful site analysis — and solar studies — kick off every project.  We employ generous, strategic, glazing to blur the line between indoors and out and to provide effective cross ventilation. Even at the smallest sites, opportunities exist to capture natural light, a focused view, and fresh air. Our designs work throughout the seasons, providing passive heating and cooling as required.

Encouraging the use of sustainable building materials and green building practices are company trademarks. Building green is building smart and we encourage our clients to embrace the benefits of living well with the least ecological impact. With both LEED (Platinum) and Living Building Challenge (Petal + Living Certifications) success, our studio remains at the vanguard of deep green design.

We have extensive, hands on, construction knowledge, and take the time to work through planning, site and structural solutions early in the design phase. The best architectural documents not only illustrate our client's design goals, but also clearly convey to the builder the how and why of each step along the way.  Client's willing, we encourage the general and/or trade contractors to offer their construction methodology and materials expertise during the design process.  This team approach minimizes field questions and/or confusion, and supports an on-budget, on-time, build.  Precise and demanding in our work, we provide our clients a premium, engaging, design experience, and top shelf architectural documents.

Sustainable Building

We limit the carbon footprint of our design studio and our client’s buildings. Less is more when it comes to energy consumption and our body of work contains many examples of successfully employing passive and active solar design principles.  30 Years ago, we were awarded Outstanding Environmentally Sensitive Residence for one of our earliest residential projects.  In 2014, we received international recognition as the architectural + interior design team for Desert Rain, the world's first residential Living Certified Building. Last year, our 1 Riverstone project received Living Building Challenge (LBC) Petal Certification and this spring our River Sol project was awarded LBC Living Certification, the sixth home in the world to achieve this Certification.

The majority of our design studio power is generated by solar photovoltaic panels. We offer staff incentives to commute on foot or by bike. Materials such as bamboo flooring, wheatboard trim, no V.O.C. paints and formaldehyde-free insulation contributed to our design studio remodel. Outside a xeriscape boulder garden greets our clients, and inside we generate more recycling material than waste.

It is standard practice to refer our clients to companies sourcing, producing and/or promoting sustainable building materials, practices and native landscape design. Local and Regional companies such as Sustainable Northwest Wood, Sundog gardenworks and Legum Design all support our deep green architectural and interior design work.  Working as a team with owners, builders, and suppliers, we shall continue reducing our work’s impact on the biosphere.

Better, Not Bigger

Quality, not quantity, is a guiding principle at Tozer Design. Using a disciplined artistic eye and more than 50 years of cumulative design experience, we create engaging spaces that live well beyond their square footage.  Long views, natural light, a disciplined palette, appropriate glazing, intuitive traffic patterns, indoor/outdoor rooms, and multiple-use spaces all contribute to living large, in less.

We believe the best spaces can be found using an ergonomic approach to living and human-scale solutions. Gymnasium-scale great rooms are wonderful for, well..., gym, but not for a secure sense of refuge.  Our spaces are well sized, not over-sized, and inspire via their thoughtful, high-quality, fit and finish.

Treating space and light as sacred, our goal is better living through better design.  We highly recommend Patterns of Home (Jacobson, Silverstein + Winslow), Stephen R. Kellert's Nature by Design and Sarah Susanka’s The Not So Big House as primers on design philosophy vital to our firm.