Musubi House is located on 100 acres of grass and Ohio forest along the northeast slope of Mauna Kea on Hawaii's Big Island. Designed by design studio Craig Steely Architecture, the cast-in-place concrete house is completely off the grid and powered by photovoltaic panels, with all domestic and landscape water coming from a rooftop cistern and internal water from rainfall. The site consists of valleys and seasonal creeks as well as extensive Wainaku meadows. Panoramic views abound, but the site was complicated by its exposure to high winds and horizontal rain.

The owners approached Craig Steely Architecture with a simple request: to create a house that would embrace the wind and grass of the Hamakua coast. The design team responded by asking the house to float in this sea of undulating grass like a ship floating in the ocean. The sharpest end of the triangular house resists the fearsome wind, like the bow of a ship. The house gets its name from its appearance, which is similar to the Hawaiian version of the Japanese onigiri. While looking at the drawings, a carpenter thought the plan looked like a musubi...... That's why the name was used.

The structure of the house is simple, with an outdoor triangle and an interior triangle supporting a diamond-shaped roof. The interior triangle is made up of three short, curved concrete walls. These concrete curves specify three areas of the house: the bedroom and bathroom area, the kitchen area, and the work and living area. A central triangular atrium provides an outdoor room between these areas, with floors cut from Pahoehoe lava.

The client's priority was permeability over privacy, giving Craig Steely Architecture the freedom to create a plan without doors or hard boundaries. The space flows from one area to another, while always maintaining visual contact with the undulating landscape. The lawn extends to the edge of the floor-to-ceiling glass wall. Looking out of the window at the rolling grass was like looking at the waves of the ocean.