A stucco wall cuts across the clearing at Oakley House, enclosing a gravel courtyard on a wooded site that already offers privacy in every direction. Designed by Ravi Raj Architect together with developer D&A Companies, the four-bedroom, five-bathroom house in Accord, New York, United States, sits between a pond and an existing stone wall, and it organizes its rooms around that enclosed yard.

Houses in dense woods usually open outward and let the trees do the screening. Here the courtyard makes a separate outdoor room inside the forest. A large boulder anchors the gravel floor, young trees are planted against the stucco, and rectangular openings cut through the wall frame selected views of the woods behind it. From inside the house, the courtyard becomes the foreground and the forest a backdrop seen over and through the wall.

The plan follows a pinwheel configuration around this center. An L-shaped main house wraps two sides, and an accessory dwelling unit sits in the opposite corner as a second, self-contained volume that gives the program flexibility. The standing seam metal roofs step down in height from the main house to the ADU, and the ADU’s roof runs directly into the courtyard wall, leaving the junction between building and boundary exposed. Large windows throughout open the rooms to both the courtyard and the surrounding woods.

The living room extends into a screened porch used for dining. A double-sided fireplace finished in stucco matches the exterior walls, so the same material appears on both sides of the glass.

Oak millwork from Decospan’s Shinnoki line carries the interior. It begins in the kitchen as full-height cabinetry and a recessed window seat, then continues through the living room as door and window surrounds. At the stair, a slatted oak screen extends the wrapping into the entry while leaving gaps that keep the upper and lower levels visible to each other. The ground floor is laid in Belgian bluestone, a dense limestone with a dark honed finish that tolerates the grit tracked in from the courtyard.