Even city slickers need to recharge with the occasional escape. Indeed, close proximity to natural spaces is a hallmark of life in Cascadia’s biggest cities. The ability to get onto the water and lost in the mountains from downtown Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver are bedrock components of each city’s quality of life proposition.
Although “Metronatural,” Seattle’s official slogan from 2006 to 2011, was much maligned in the press as a hollow branding agency exercise, its definition accurately encapsulates the aspirations of a life well lived in the Emerald City: “1: having the characteristics of a world-class metropolis within wild, beautiful natural surroundings; 2: a blending of clear skies and expansive water with a fast paced city life; 3: one who respects the environment and lives a balanced lifestyle of urban and natural experiences.”
In my role as The Seattle Times’s outdoors reporter, I sometimes question if the magnetic pull of the great outdoors counterproductively saps some of our region’s urban vitality. Yet, as I put the downtown skyline in my rearview mirror time after time, I acknowledge that I’m subject to the siren call of the mountains and Sound as much as the next Pacific Northwesterner. Our wild places are superlative, at times globally so — for example, Olympic National Park is recognized by UNESCO as both a World Heritage Site and an International Biosphere Reserve.
With a few exceptions, such as Olson/Kundig’s exceptional work in the San Juan Islands and Methow Valley, the built environment outside the metropolitan core is sorely lacking. Our region’s gateway towns to national parks and other public lands are often economically depressed and hardly bastions of quality architecture. And yet, the creative prowess of the region skews toward the natural — from industry-leading environmental innovations for buildings to a healthy corps of designers working on outdoor recreation equipment. In short, the Pacific Northwest should be at the forefront of thoughtful architecture and design in spectacular natural settings, yet it feels as though we are lagging behind our potential.
The summer opening of outdoors brand Snow Peak’s first North American campground, Campfield Long Beach, designed by local firm EFA Architects, inches closer to making that proposition a reality—where the best of Nordic and Japanese design combine on the unfinished canvas of the Washington coast to elevate outdoor living and set a new standard for Northwest contemporary architecture.
Japanese alpinist Yukio Yamai founded Snow Peak in 1958 to make climbing equipment. In the 1980s, the company entered the vehicle camping market after Yamai’s son, Tohru, embarked on a road trip through the American West. Tohru’s daughter, Lisa, added an apparel line in the 2010s. Consistently throughout Snow Peak’s evolution, the brand has emphasized minimalist design and a neutral palette, in contrast to much of the outdoor industry’s embrace of garish color schemes.
Snow Peak invests heavily in industrial design and manufacturing, with a production facility at its Niigata headquarters that makes the brand’s trademark titanium goods like cutlery, cookware and drinkware known for their lightweight durability and ergonomic feel. The company has also developed a proprietary anodising process that allows product owners to customize their titanium chopsticks and cups. This kind of participatory design process builds brand loyalty, something which Snow Peak has accomplished with aplomb as something of a cult brand among outdoor enthusiasts.
That brand-customer connection is at its most intense in the company’s self-owned and managed campgrounds, known as Campfields. There are 13 locations in Japan and one in South Korea. While campers are welcome to bring their own equipment, the sites are designed to showcase Snow Peak’s tents, chairs, tables, fire pits and grills (all products are available for rent on site and many are for sale in the campstore). A few times each year, Campfields host Snow Peak Way gatherings for the brand’s most ardent fans. The effect is like a lookbook or catalog come to life. This type of immersive brand experience recalls other design-centric hospitality options like the Ikea Hotell in Sweden or the Muji Hotel Ginza in Tokyo—except here the customer is an essential component, bringing their own Snow Peak camp setup in whatever gear configuration they have acquired.
As a result, Campfields operate differently from US campgrounds. Rather than serving as a base for exploring the surrounding area, Campfields are a destination in and of themselves. That orientation sets a high bar for the user experience, something Snow Peak has invested heavily in with Campfield Long Beach. The brand sought a site near its North American headquarters in Portland but also within reach of Seattle, another major market. After scouting locations across mountains and deserts, an old RV park in Long Beach, Washington near the Oregon border came across the team’s radar. Snow Peak purchased the derelict campground in 2020.
Long Beach-based father-son design/build firm Erik Fagerland & Associates (EFA) was hired as a consultant to secure a variance due to the site’s environmentally-sensitive wetlands. In a surprise outcome, EFA then won the bid to design the entire project, beating out big-city competitors. A former motor lifeboat operator with the Coast Guard at nearby Station Cape Disappointment who came to architecture from carpentry, founder Erik Fagerland has lived on the coast since 1983. His son Scott grew up there and joined the practice as lead designer in 2016.
Rather than “minimalist,” they prefer the term “economical” to describe the Scandinavian approach to architecture, which dovetails neatly with Snow Peak’s aesthetic. Additionally, their Norwegian family heritage includes generations of carpenters and boat builders. On a continent defined by immigration, both the Nordics and Nippon have left an indelible stamp on the Pacific Northwest. While perhaps surprising that those two cultural influences haven’t overlapped more already, they find a design expression in Campfield Long Beach with the work of architects who profess a love of the interiors by Finnish master Alvar Aalto and studied the work of famed contemporary Japanese architect Kengo Kuma at the Portland Japanese Garden. (Kuma also designed the prefabricated cabins that are one of Campfield Long Beach’s accommodation options.)
EFA designed the four structures that define Campfield Long Beach: a gatehouse, campstore, wash house and ofuro (Japanese spa). Each building is a variation on a theme — they all feature simple gabled canopies and large sheltering overhangs, as well as screened walls as a nod to Japanese architectural forms. The materials are not exotic — mostly glass and local timber like Douglas fir and Sitka spruce — but the effect is striking against the natural setting, from the gatehouse canopy that frames an entrance boardwalk to the Ofuro spa nestled in an alder grove.
“We’re elevating the commons by taking inexpensive materials and boosting them to a higher aesthetic,” says Scott Fagerland, EFA’s lead designer.
Principal and founder Erik Fagerland contrasts EFA’s approach with what you might find at a state park, where sturdy, inexpensive, but patently ugly CMU blocks are stacked and painted. The effect is heavily institutional; borderline prison-like. Instead, EFA deployed board-formed concrete on the Campfield wash house exterior. While more labor intensive, the hand-touched process produces a more textured finished product. “It’s all in how you express the materials,” he says.
The bucolic setting, meanwhile, owes itself to Portland-based landscape architects 2.Ink + Knot Studio, who remediated an abused landscape of abandoned mobile homes, stacks of tires and oil drums, and concrete pads into a thriving wetland with hundreds of new native plants. As for the cozy campstore serving up barista-made coffee drinks by the fireplace, credit hospitality designer North45 Projects, also of Portland.
The resulting campground, with a mix of empty tent sites, turnkey tent rentals and the aforementioned cabins, has already drawn capacity crowds since its soft opening in March. Between my own positive review in The Seattle Times and the campground’s listing on Time’s World’s Best Places 2024, Campfield has boosted the visibility of one of the lesser-known corners of the Pacific Northwest—a place more infamous for its inhospitality, namely the miserable winter of 1805-1806 that the Lewis and Clark expedition spent at the mouth of the Columbia River.
“This is a funny place, a sandpit in the fog,” says Erik Fagerland of his adopted home.
But with Snow Peak’s vision and EFA’s execution, this sandpit in the fog has become leagues more hospitable for anyone with a design sensibility looking to reconnect in nature.
