A Canadian architecture practice has completed a house in North Vancouver that tries to do something unusual: disappear.

Leckie Studio, based in Vancouver, has finished Twin Peaks House — a 3,790-square-foot (352-square-metre) residence on a sloped, tree-dotted property designed for a young family. The building is clad in grey-hued vertical cedar, chosen so that the silvery wood tones help the structure "recede among the trees," as the studio described it to Dezeen.

The design is built around two offset squares in plan, each topped by a gabled roof — the peaked, triangular-ended roof type familiar from classic house shapes — and the two roofs slope in opposite directions. That asymmetry gives the house its name and its silhouette: from outside, it reads as a pair of pitched forms slightly out of step with each other.

A cast-in-place concrete plinth forms the base layer, a solid foundation poured on site to accommodate the uneven terrain. The two volumes sit above it. Between them runs a stairwell that acts as what the studio calls a "hinge," connecting the halves both structurally and in the flow of daily movement through the home.

The west side contains the social spaces: an open-plan kitchen, dining area and living room. The other half is more enclosed, holding two bedrooms. One of those bedrooms features a circular skylight and a small loft tucked into the apex of the gable — the highest interior point where the roof slopes meet. A lower level rounds out the programme with an office, gym, laundry room and garage.

What makes the house interesting beyond its clean geometry is the way every material choice serves the same goal. The cedar cladding, weathered to grey, pulls the exterior toward the palette of the surrounding tree trunks. The concrete base grounds the structure into its sloped site rather than fighting it. Even the roof lines, by turning away from each other, break up the building's mass so it never reads as a single block imposed on the landscape.

North Vancouver's dense, steep, forested residential lots have become something of a testing ground for Vancouver-area architects working with difficult terrain and tree-protection bylaws. Twin Peaks House sits squarely in that conversation — a family home that treats the forest as the given condition, not the obstacle.