The timber-clad house is a textbook example of Northwest modern architecture. Its pitched roof overhangs the walls, many of which boast floor-to-ceiling glass, keeping with the midcentury style.
Located in Forest Park, a brief drive from downtown Portland, Oregon, the four-bedroom residence partially hovers above the forest floor before its foundation kisses the ground and nestles among the surrounding Douglas firs and solid maples. The home at 720 NW Saint Helens Ave. is an architect’s dream treehouse, and it’s on the market for the first time at about $1.6 million.
The home really served as an architect’s treehouse: Saul Zaik, an Oregon architect who lionized his midcentury structures, designed the home for his family in 1961. Entered through a “floating bridge,” according to listing agent Lance George Marrs, the two-story home spreads across two pavilions — one social, the other private — also connected by cantilevered decking. In addition to the kitchen and dining space, the social wing offers a great room with a soaring ceiling vaulted with Douglas fir logs and a peaked window that looks straight into the treetops.
“What’s significant about this house, among other things, is that it is arguably a full expression of [Zaik’s] design ethos,” said Marrs, a broker at Portland Modern Real Estate. "Zaik loved the trees and the fresh air here.”
Zaik pulled inspiration from the region’s modernist forefathers — Pietro Belluschi and John Yeon — paneling the walls inside and outside his family’s home with cedar and siting the structure carefully, ensuring that daylight would continuously flow inside.
“The way that the light filters through the trees and through the house, it’s that sort of feeling that you’re floating amongst the trees, with the light continually changing through the day,” Marrs said. “You’re keenly aware of your surroundings.”
"It’s a blueprint that achieves an indoor-outdoor aesthetic," he noted. “You’re living with nature.”
The structure boasts Japanese architectural influences and nods to local agrarian traditions with its ample rough-sawn cedar siding. Its second pavilion descends to the ground, giving its bedrooms a view of the surrounding forest floor.
Even the home’s carport, a pared-back, open box rendered in the same cedar planks, isn’t “just any carport,” Marrs said. “It’s such beautiful design.” Still, it's the only qualm Marrs can imagine someone finding with the home: “I would say that someone who is insistent upon having an enclosed garage instead of a carport, that may give someone pause.”
'A process, and an emotional one'
Selling such a personal home was a difficult choice for its owners, Marrs explained.
Saul Zaik passed away in 2020 at the age of 94, and his surviving family, including his wife, Frances, held on to the home for a while. Their decision to lead the home to its next chapter has “been a process, and an emotional one,” Marrs said.
Once settled on the matter, the family focused on updating the home, modernizing systems throughout so the design would be well-outfitted to survive the coming decades. The house was repiped, a new furnace and air conditioning unit were installed, the oil tank was decommissioned, the septic system was overhauled and the decking was repaired.
“All those things were done with a light touch,” Marrs said, “to honor what’s there.”
What’s there, he noted, works. “I still feel like that house is timeless to the point where everything just feels on point and current.”