Restoration as Authorship: Field Notes from Mossywoods on Orcas Island

Mossywoods has been named a 2026 LUXE RED Award Winner in the Restoration or Renovation category, Colorado and the Rockies. Presented annually by LUXE Interiors + Design, the RED Awards recognize Residential Excellence in Design across architecture, interiors, landscape, and product.

The recognition affirms an idea the studio has long worked toward: that restoration, done well, is a form of authorship.

A 1,200-square-foot cottage on a family farm

Mossywoods sits on a forested site within a long-standing family farm on Orcas Island, the largest of the San Juan Islands in the Pacific Northwest. The existing structure was modest in scale and generous in memory. The charge was to preserve what the family had built by hand, update the performance of the home for daily life, and let the surrounding landscape speak more plainly.

Scalloped wood shingles and other exterior details, originally crafted by the owner-couple’s family, were repurposed rather than replaced. Multi-color siding gave way to a monochromatic envelope so the forest reads first. Existing cedar was refinished and carried inside, now serving as the living-area ceiling and exterior soffits. What was already here became the material vocabulary.

Interiors shaped for the way the house is used

A repositioned front door, flanked by new sidelights, opens to a built-in bench with open cubbies and a custom live-edge walnut mirror. The kitchen sits at the center of the plan, anchored by a quartzite-topped walnut cabinet system and island. The main living area accommodates library storage, deep seating, and a suspended fireplace that holds the room in cold weather.

Flooring is a durable, large-format porcelain tile, chosen for muddy paws and Pacific Northwest weather. The main bedroom suite and a flexible guest suite complete the plan. Every decision is legible. Nothing is performing for a photograph.

Restoration as a form of authorship

Renovation invites a category problem. The temptation is to erase, to modernize as if history were an inconvenience. The discipline is to do the opposite: to edit with a steady hand, to keep what already carries meaning, and to introduce only what the house genuinely needs.

Mossywoods is a small project on a large idea. The shingles a family member cut by hand are still on the walls. The cedar that weathered a Pacific Northwest winter is still here, now inside. The house is quieter than it was, and closer to itself.

The LUXE RED Awards jury has recognized this way of working before. It remains, for Rowland+Broughton, the most interesting territory in residential design.