10 Greatest Homes

The 10 Greatest Homes in Seattle History

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 04:00:00 -0800

Image: Benjamin Woolsey

The Studio House by Olson Kundig Architects

Seattle’s 10 Greatest Homes

Six design experts choose the most outstanding houses in the city’s history.

Plus! Don’t miss our web exclusive slideshow for more views of great Seattle homes

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Web Exclusive: 10 More Great Houses

Seattle Met invited a panel of experts to nominate the 10 greatest houses of Seattle. While there was much agreement, there were plenty of diverging opinions as well. Here are 10 more fine homes that almost made the cut.

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Four Common Seattle Home Styles

For the last century and more, most single-family homes have been built by developers, on spec. Here are four distinct design families we can see in Seattle and the suburbs.

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Q&A with Architect Tom Kundig

Thoughts on residential design by architect Tom Kundig

Slideshow: Seattle’s 10 Greatest Homes

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 12:00:00 -0800

Slide Show: 10 More Great Houses

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 12:00:00 -0800

Seattle Met invited a panel of experts to nominate the 10 greatest houses of Seattle. While there was much agreement, there were plenty of diverging opinions as well. Here are 10 more fine homes that almost made the cut.

Seattle’s 10 Greatest Homes

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 04:00:00 -0800

THERE ARE RESIDENTIAL NEIGHBORHOODS IN Seattle where, in the space of a couple of blocks, you feel as though you’ve stumbled onto a world’s fair of architectural history. Porticos from ancient Greece, parapets from colonial Mexico, echoes of the Italian Renaissance and Georgian England, a swooping roofline off the American prairie and a Japanese-accented bungalow and a Bauhaus machine by way of Germany—it’s all there, testament both to glorious American individualism and a considerable degree of confusion over just what is the proper outfit for a home in the urban Pacific Northwest.

It’s exactly this raging eclecticism that gives so many Seattle neighborhoods—Capitol Hill, Ravenna, Madison Park, to cite just a few—their charming chemistry, a fact somehow lost on the late-twentieth-century developers who strewed the suburbs with endless moraines of near-identical houses. As far as residential architecture is concerned, Seattle has never established a single, well-defined direction, and this is its great strength. Seattle “is unusually indulgent to those of its citizens who prefer to live in dreams and memories,” observed Jonathan Raban, writing to make sense of the place as an immigrant. “If you want to bury yourself in a cottage in the trees, pretending that you’re living inside a nineteenth-century French novel, or that you’re back home in another decade and another country, Seattle will do astonishingly little to disturb your illusion.”

The reason, of course, is that we’re a relatively young city, weak on tradition and perpetually teeming with people newly arrived from somewhere else.

The earliest Seattle homes fostered no illusions. They were the simple, one-and-a-half-story gabled frame houses in the folk-vernacular tradition you would find everywhere in the Western world. But Seattle was a timber town, and fancy millwork was soon available for those who could afford it, even before the railroad arrived in 1883. After the railroad, and the arrival of the first professional architects, Seattle began to bloom with Victorian finery, then with the costume party of historical revival styles that were also sweeping the rest of the country.

Back then there wasn’t any effort to create a “Seattle” style tailored to the climate and landscape, but there wasn’t any such thing in most other cities, either. Until recently, the American home has always been a statement to the world about how well the occupants are doing, not about how their values are attuned to the hills and trees around them. Seattle’s residential architecture, at least until the Second World War, mainly expressed ambition, optimism, and especially a freedom from the constraints of “correctness.” When a 24-year-old architect named Ellsworth Storey slipped a pair of classical Doric columns under the porch roof of a Swiss chalet, all with a distant echo of Frank Lloyd Wright’s early Prairie houses, he showed he understood what his just-adopted city was about. Still, in his work you can spot the stirrings of regionalism—local materials, generous windows to scoop in the skinflint winter light. Yep, Storey understood.

The Jurors

Lawrence W. Cheek
has written about architecture and urban design for more than 30 years as a critic for Crosscut, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Indianapolis Star, and Tucson Citizen. His latest book is about boatbuilding: The Year of the Boat (Sasquatch Books, 2008).

John DeForest
is a Seattle native, Yale- and Harvard-educated architect, and was instrumental in founding the Northwest chapter of CORA, the Congress of Residential Architects. His firm, DeForest Architects, majors in residential and small-scale commercial design.

Tom Holst
is a Seattle real estate broker and irrepressible enthusiast of “cool” modernist residential architecture from the 1950s to the present, showcased on his website seattlemodern.com (“There will be no ‘Old World charm’ on this website”).

Lawrence Kreisman
is program director of Historic Seattle and a prolific writer on historic architecture. He coauthored The Arts and Crafts Movement in the Pacific Northwest (Timber Press, 2007). His new book is Dard Hunter: The Graphic Works (Pomegranate Communications, 2012).

Peter Steinbrueck
is an architect, former Seattle City Council member (1997–2007), and son of architect Victor Steinbrueck, who helped save Pike Place Market and codesigned the Space Needle. Since leaving the city council, Steinbrueck created his own urban planning consulting firm, Steinbrueck Urban Strategies.

Caroline T. Swope
is an architectural historian and author of the indispensable Classic Houses of Seattle (Timber Press, 2005). She is principal of Kingstree Studios, a cultural resource management firm that drafts National Register nominations, special tax valuations, and historic building reports.

After the war, modernism bloomed in Seattle, for better and worse. A number of architects began exploring a vocabulary of crisp modern forms executed largely in native materials—cedar and fir—and paying more attention to views and the integration of indoor and outdoor space than traditional architecture had. It helped that many of the architect-designed houses built here after 1950 had to be constructed on steep leftover lots that earlier homebuilders had passed up as being too difficult to bother with. Bad sites generate dramatic architecture. Something called the “Northwest contemporary” house arose, and although it’s too diverse to be called a coherent style it has a unifying ethic: respect for the land.

We’re a place blessed with magnificent landscapes. How could there be any better inspiration for architecture?

In the following pages, a jury of architects, architectural historians, and fierce enthusiasts has selected 10 “great houses” that speak volumes about what Seattle is (and was), and that illustrate design excellence in different ways. Before going there, though, we should take a moment to talk about what makes a house “great.” (Arguments will be sure to follow.)

In spite of the everlasting American obsession with size, it isn’t size. Nor the impression the house makes on the outside. Two of the residences we’re celebrating here are under 1,500 square feet. Three are invisible from the street, and two others present almost expressionless faces that barely hint at the dramatic qualities behind the facades. The idea of the house as manifestation of power and wealth is passe, even if not everyone has gotten the message yet.

Instead a great house is about a coherent idea: an intangible quality such as serenity (George Suyama’s Fauntleroy residence) or the material possibilities of concrete block (Frank Lloyd Wright’s Tracy residence). A great house is rich in expressive details that are more than mere decoration; details that speak about the nature of materials or structure (Ralph Anderson’s Alki Beach residence). A great house artfully considers its surroundings. Sit down on a strategically placed armchair in the Lake Union floating home designed by Barry Burgess, and the Seattle skyline—surprise!—clicks into view, perfectly framed, effectively becoming part of the space and culture of the house. A larger enclosed space wouldn’t have made it better, and it would have overwhelmed the neighborhood’s scale. Here’s one more thing: A great house is not selfish.

Nearly all these houses were designed by architects—the one exception is the Denny residence, apparently built from one of the pattern books popular in the late nineteenth century. Engaging an architect is, inevitably, a more expensive way to put a roof over the family’s head than buying a cloned builder’s house. But it’s an expression of values, and maybe even character.

Architect Tom Kundig puts it this way: “People who build their own homes tend to be very courageous.”

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Alki Beach Residence, 1998

Alki Beach Residence

Architect: Ralph Anderson
Year Built: 1998

Ralph Anderson, who died in 2010, was the master of the Northwest contemporary aesthetic. His houses typically feature simple geometric forms with a faint Asian accent, big structural bones proudly in view, lavish glass, skins of native woods like fir and cedar, and a remarkable delicacy expressed in countless details. His son Ross Anderson, whose construction company built this 2,833-square-foot beach house in which the senior Andersons lived, confirms his father had “an obsession with how things join together.” Indeed. There’s pleasure simply in seeing how small cedar posts and beams supporting a lavatory bowl clasp each other with interlocking cross halving joints. It’s how nature herself would build a house, if she intended it to last for centuries.

This urban house, in fact, seems as though it’s all about nature—an unusual achievement considering its constricted 35-foot-wide lot. The two-story living room thrusts itself toward Elliott Bay with a three-sided glass extrusion that wants to gather in all of Puget Sound. When waves paw at the beach, the water music seems to come not merely from in front of the house, but from all around it.

Fauntleroy Residence, 2003

Fauntleroy Residence
Architect: George Suyama of Suyama Peterson Deguchi
Year Built: 2003

George Suyama’s own house, which won a Seattle AIA Honor award in 2003, is all about the creation of dramatic space with the least possible architecture. It’s a uniquely Northwestern example of minimalism, one that majors in sensory richness rather than deprivation.

Suyama orchestrated the house as a procession; it’s meant to reveal itself as a sequence. From an anonymous face to the street that reveals nothing, you proceed through a covered outdoor living room—usable even in January, the Suyamas report—into a long, narrow great room with a view of Puget Sound off the west end. Descending the stairs to bedroom, den, and finally wine cellar, the procession becomes a vertical Z, ending with the feeling of having arrived in a medieval catacomb. Cascading water channels flow outside the north, mostly glass walls, the constant burbling enhancing the sense of the house as a serene, self-contained world.

Apart from the garage and outdoor room, the house is a modest 2,600 square feet, and it demonstrates how much richness is possible through focus on one coherent idea. The 2003 AIA jury called it “a deeply personal, world-class achievement.” It’s a testimonial to how far Seattle architecture has come since the days of borrowing the rest of the world’s ideas.

David Thomas Denny Residence, 1888

David Thomas Denny Residence
Queen Anne (Demolished)
Year Built: 1888

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Seattle skyline was a picturesque quiver of spiky turrets, finials, gables, and pediments. Nearly all these Victorian homes are gone now, victims of the frenzied hill shaving and apartment raising that came with the prosperity of the early 1900s. The David Thomas Denny mansion that once stood at 512 Queen Anne Avenue is a lovely example of the style that gave the hill its name.

Denny was among the small band of pioneers who founded the settlement of Seattle on a rainy fall day in 1851. He became a millionaire sawmill owner and developer, and built this Queen Anne–style mansion for his family in 1888. Its sizzling geometry and delicate, spindly ornaments were composed with immaculate grace, but the architect is unrecorded: The design apparently came from a pattern book.

The Dennys enjoyed their grand home for only five years. They lost most of their fortune, including the house, in the Panic of 1893. The fate of the house sadly paralleled the family’s. It was moved, then chopped into apartments, and finally demolished in 1938.

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Tracy Residence, 1955

Tracy Residence
Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright
Normandy Park
Year Built: 1955

Frank Lloyd Wright remains conspicuously alone among A-list architects in addressing the issue of modest houses for people who might have vision and artistic impulse but not wealth. Although Wright had lavishly luxurious tastes himself and was chronically in debt, he rarely turned down a potential client who came in with an impossibly pinched budget. For such people, he would design a variation on his Usonian house concept—he sprinkled some 60 around the country between 1936 and 1959—and although they invariably soared in far over budget, they’re the real thing: deeply respectful of site, rich in texture and exquisitely tuned geometry, full of fascinating details. People who commissioned a Usonian house were not stuck with lower-drawer Wright.

There are two Usonian houses in the Seattle area: the Brandes House in Sammamish and the Tracy House in Normandy Park. Tracy is smaller, at 1,150 square feet, built with a preposterously complex system of 11 different kinds of custom concrete blocks. Some incorporate tiny windows or light fixtures. As Usonian clients often did, Bill and Elizabeth Tracy pitched a lot of their own labor into the house, casting every one of the 1,700 blocks themselves. The house cost $25,000 to build and went on the market in 2011 for $1,159,000.

The EcoHome Foundation will host scheduled tours of the Tracy residence the weekend of January 21. For information, contact ecohome@mindspring.com.

Lake Union Floating Home, 2002, Interior

Lake Union Floating Home
Designer: Barry Burgess
Year Built: 2002

The classic floating homes ringing Lake Union and Portage Bay, relics of a simpler, less self-conscious Seattle, tend to be small, folk-artsy, and funky. Many of the newest additions to the west side of the waterfront are large, slick, and luxurious. Barry Burgess’s 2002 design skillfully charted a course between the two polar extremes. It might be the quintessential Seattle houseboat.

Lake Union Floating Home, 2002, Exterior

The dwelling looks like the considered marriage of a Craftsman bungalow and a classic wooden boat—two Seattle bloodlines coming together, appropriately, on Lake Union. The barrel-vault ceiling over the second-story den arcs across laminated fir beams, a scaled-up sailboat cabin. As in a boat, no possibility for storage space is wasted; even the cherry-faced Craftsman-style columns flanking the fireplace open to reveal shelves for DVDs. It’s only 1,400 square feet, but it doesn’t feel tight. Because it’s all so logically functional and carefully executed, it avoids the trap that ensnares so many designers working in popular historical styles. “I was searching for an honest expression of the materials,” Burgess says, “trying to get underneath the kitsch.”

Studio House, 1993–98

Studio House
Architect: Tom Kundig of Olson Kundig Architects
North Seattle
1993–98

The Studio House resides on a commanding bluff with a dramatic view of Puget Sound, and also at a watershed in Tom Kundig’s career. He’d served his apprenticeship, was simmering with heady ideas of form and a new vocabulary of materials, and here found a client who was herself an artist and had the courage to trust him.

The bones of the house are deceptively simple: a long, tall, narrow concrete box pierced with a steel I-beam grid that thrusts into the big living room, and an airfoil-like vault roof that shapes the wind rolling over the bluff. Outside, these elements create an elaborate geometric harmony of planes and curves, jostling and connecting. Inside, the concrete walls have an immense brute presence; they look eternal and would feel overpowering to some. But there are protective, intimate spaces in the house, too, and an endless parade of intriguing details. Kundig especially likes the industrial-strength black ceiling fans suspended from the I beams. “Dayton Fans,” he says, “used in chicken houses. Cost $250.” The point, he adds quickly, is not to create an artificial industrial aesthetic, but a coherent language.

Dowell Residence, 1954

Dowell Residence
Architect: Architect: Paul Hayden Kirk
Seward Park
Year Built: 1954

Modern architecture settled in Seattle largely through the work of four architects: Paul Thiry, Roland Terry, Victor Steinbrueck, and Paul Hayden Kirk. Kirk’s Dowell Residence, which Architectural Record magazine singled out as one of its “Record Houses” in 1957, was an effort to soften the severe International Style for the Northwest by executing it in fir and cedar instead of concrete and steel. Its deceptively simple form is actually a dazzlingly complex essay in boxes and rectangles and all the materials one might deploy for them. Inside are shoji screens crafted with panels of translucent resin and tawny horsehair, and it’s evident the craftsman even composed the flow of the hair from panel to panel as a kind of architectural melodic line. As Mies van der Rohe, the spiritual father of modernism, said, “God is in the details.”

The house’s current owners say the house has a kind of “serene energy” that they’ve fallen in love with. They’ve also learned an inconvenient truth: Midcentury modern homes demand a lot of maintenance; the slightest incursion of shabbiness stands out like an indictment. A few of those horsehair panels have broken, and the owners have been working for several years to find a craftsman who can fabricate replacements. The devil, too, is in the details.

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Stimson-Green Residence, 1899–1901

Stimson-Green Residence
Architect: Architect: Kirtland Cutter
1204 Minor Avenue, First Hill
Year Built: 1899–1901

Like most architects of his time, Kirtland Cutter maintained a wardrobe of picturesque styles that he rotated, project to project, and frequently mixed in the same building (with mixed results). For Seattle timber magnate C. D. Stimson, Cutter selected the half-timbered Tudor style that looked far back to medieval England, but was just beginning a popular revival in the United States. Outside, the 10,000-square-foot mansion’s bulk is broken down by the delicate geometry of porches, dormers, and window bays. Inside is a cavalcade of fine millwork and exotic theme decoration, all the way up to lions and dragons guarding the living room fireplace.

Its First Hill neighborhood was the first “suburban” retreat from downtown Seattle for the city’s wealthy, but its 40-odd mansions were razed surprisingly quickly in favor of hospitals and high-rise apartments. Stimson-Green is one of a bare handful to survive into the twenty-first century. The Joshua Green family kept it as a private residence until 1975, after which it passed through the hands of Historic Seattle and the Stimsons’ granddaughter Patsy Collins, then finally to the Washington Trust for Historic Preservation. Many rooms remain in near-original condition, and the house is open by appointment for tours and events.

Pierre Ferry Residence, 1904–07

Pierre Ferry Residence
Architects: John Graham Sr. and Alfred Bodley
Capitol Hill
Year Built: 1904–07

The Arts and Crafts movement arose in England in the late nineteenth century in reaction to anonymous, mass-produced goods of indifferent quality—sound familiar? It migrated to the Pacific Northwest in the early twentieth century, finding expression in a wide range of handcrafted home furnishings, decorations, and architecture. Seattle’s wealth of bungalows arose out of the Arts and Crafts movement, and so did a few of its mansions.

For the Pierre Ferry residence, British-born architect John Graham Sr. fashioned a stucco-clad exterior inspired by the English country manors of Charles Voysey and Baillie Scott. For the interior, Alfred Bodley, who briefly associated with Graham, commissioned a swarm of craftsmen to execute fine details such as an iridescent glass-mosaic fireplace surround and intricate hand-carved woodwork. Graham went on to bigger things, literally—he designed many of downtown Seattle’s most important commercial buildings. But the Ferry residence, still maintained as a private home, is considered the finest expression of the Arts and Crafts philosophy in the city.

Ellsworth Storey Houses, 1903–05, interior

Ellsworth Storey Houses
Architect: Ellsworth Storey
Madrona
Year Built: 1903–05

Very little architecture in early-twentieth-century Seattle wore any regional character or personal imprint of the designer. It was a masked ball of standardized revival styles: a Tudor on this corner, neoclassical over there. But one architect, Ellsworth Storey, newly arrived from Chicago in 1903, demonstrated an embryonic direction with his first work in his adopted city.

Storey designed this pair of houses in the Denny-Blaine neighborhood for himself and his parents, and they look like none of their contemporaries. Storey had taken the Grand Tour of Europe, and there’s an obvious echo of Swiss chalet in these houses—but it’s stripped down, desentimentalized, modernized. There’s also a tingle of the Prairie style that Frank Lloyd Wright was then exploring, and a touch of the Arts and Crafts movement. Storey was trying to integrate all these into a regional vocabulary. We can also read his interest in a Seattle-appropriate architecture in the all-native wood, river rock, and generous window area, luring in a lot of the reluctant winter light.

Storey never took the radical path out of the historical vocabulary that these first houses suggested he might, but his work continued to be more personalized and creative than most of his contemporaries. He was Seattle’s first regionalist.

Q&A with Architect Tom Kundig

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 04:00:00 -0800

Photo: Courtesy Tim Bies/Olson Kundig Architects

TOM KUNDIG, A PRINCIPAL IN OLSON KUNDIG Architects, is among Seattle’s most celebrated architects, and his career arc is distinctive in its determined concentration on houses—most of them single-family, ranging from an 11,000-square-foot live/work residence to a 191-square-foot cabin. A number of these creations are featured in a September 2011 book from Princeton Architectural Press, Tom Kundig: Houses 2. Kundig, 57, sat down in his Pioneer Square office for an interview about houses and his approach to designing them.

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What should people experience in their homes?
Virtually life’s full range of experiences. This is the reason I’m so interested in residential work. The home is primal, it’s visceral, it’s our primitive past, it carries all the baggage of our cultural life. It has to have prospect, the sense of being in the open; but also intimacy and protection. It has to encompass open and closed, hot and cold, fast and slow, light and dark, yin and yang. That’s how we experience life, and that’s how we should experience a house.

You seem to revel in the challenge of designing homes.
People who build their own home tend to be very courageous. These people are curious about life. They’re thinking about what it means to live in a house, rather than just buying a commodity and making it work.

It takes some sacrifice, doesn’t it? Most people are looking for sheer square footage.
Absolutely. But a lot of my clients are willing to do a 1,500-square-foot, beautifully detailed home. They don’t want the 3,000-square-foot empty box with colonial columns that makes some sort of pretension of success. I don’t want to make a value judgment on that, which I just sort of did, but it’s a different way of looking at how you want to spend your money.

Do you enjoy the challenge of doing small houses?
In some ways they’re the most satisfying because they go back to that primitive place—the small hut that is a refuge, small enough that it can open out to the landscape. The only way you can really experience that landscape throughout a house is if it’s relatively small. If you have a big house you begin to lose touch with the outside quadrant.

How does this “outside quadrant” shape your work?
Seattle is a place of unbelievable natural beauty. You cannot be here without wanting to be part of that out there. So in some of these houses you can literally move some parts of the building to be outside. Shadowboxx in the San Juans takes this to another level. Walls move to open the interior, allowing the couch/beds to roll out under the day or night sky. The bath roof literally opens to the sky. In a perfect world, a house in this kind of environment could shed or add walls and roofs, like clothing responding to the situation.

What else do you look at to generate a house’s form, space, textures?
Just about everything. In a custom home, you’re painting the value system of the owner. The design is also being pushed on by the landscape, topography, light and sun and ventilation. All these conspiring vectors are coming in and shaping this thing.

“Conspiring vectors” makes it sound extremely complicated.
It is. A lot of it is intuitive. It’s this swirling equation that’s floating around and you’re trying to bring it together.

So do you look for one central theme to give a home design coherence?
It’s hard to say that one theme would always solve a complex series of vectors like a home. A tent has a pretty singular mission, and it can be solved in a lot of different ways, which is why you have all those different shapes. But a home is not a simple mission. I do try to simplify the overall form while addressing as many of the issues as possible. That way we save money in the budget for the precious things that people touch, like the window in the Chicken Point Cabin. It’s all geometry and physics so you can easily move a six-ton device. It amazes people every time they use it.

Is touch important because it engages us with another of the senses?
Exactly. If you think about moving a door—and this is why I like to do these large doors—it’s a moment at which your shoulder and arm and hand become an extension of that door. You’re in concert with the physics of the door. That’s a fantastic thing when you realize it. I like it when people are stunned into wonderment.

Four Common Seattle Home Styles

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 04:00:00 -0800

Photo: Courtesy West Seattle Blog

The Seattle Box

The “Seattle Box” or “Four-Square” was a geometric form—a simple, near-square, two-story box onto which one of several styles could be grafted, like flavors of shredded wheat. In the neighborhoods where Seattle Boxes prevail, such as Beacon Hill and Capitol Hill, these can include Craftsman, Tuscan, neoclassical, and even Mission Revival. But the Four-Square arose as a reaction to the fussy pretensions of the Victorian age, so both its geometry and decoration are usually restrained. The Seattle adaptation often featured an inset front porch and thrust-out second-story window bays to gather more sunlight.

Many Seattle Boxes were built from pattern books or even kits supplied by Sears and Roebuck. Seattle architect Victor Voorhees published one such wildly popular pattern book in 1907; in it he illustrated an eight-room, 2,000-square-foot Seattle Box. His cost estimate: $2,400.

Midcentury Modern

Photo: Courtesy Lawrence Cheek

Bellevue has a remarkable stock of underappreciated midcentury modern houses, most notably in the hilly, winding streets between 156th Avenue and Lake Sammamish. Many, though not all, are builders’ spec houses, and they offer a forward-looking, streamlined aesthetic, a space-age evolution of the Prairie style. Living rooms often feature “cathedral” ceilings, view-friendly decks cantilever out over gardens, and brick or stone veneers add texture. The downside is that bedrooms, often lodged half underground on the low end of a split-level, tend to be as bleak and dark as the living rooms are light and dramatic.

Bungalows

Photo: Courtesy Lawrence Cheek

Bungalows boomed in Seattle from around 1905 to the eve of the Depression. They were the modern architecture of their era, more in tune with their time and the lifestyles of middle-class families than the suddenly dowdy Victorian and Tudor styles of the generations just past. Bungalows offered less structured interior spaces and suggested informal living; their honest expressions of materials and structure were seen as a part of a new value system. Artist Alfred Renfro, who built a Craftsman bungalow in the new village of Beaux Arts across Lake Washington, wrote revealingly about the enormous 14-inch-thick posts supporting the porch roof: “…we like the look and feel of heavy, massive timbers, and believe it has a good influence on the children.”

Though most of the designs were lifted from pattern books and magazines, bungalow architecture had a good influence on Seattle. The jumble of low, widely overhanging rooflines in neighborhoods like Ravenna and Wallingford bring the geometry of our mountain horizons right into the city, and the typically wide, deep porches are perfect for a chronically drippy climate. We could do worse than revive and update the bungalow for a new century.

McMansions

Photo: Courtesy Lawrence Cheek

Lacking a precise and neutral term, we’ll label this last the McMansion style—the big, mass-market single-family homes that builders ladled into suburban planned developments such as Issaquah Highlands from the 1980s to the beginning of the Great Recession. Although they lifted some details from Craftsman homes and other historic styles, the houses were hardly Arts and Crafts in philosophy—they were mass-produced as much as practicable for cost effectiveness. And they were essentially Victorian in form, with a vertical emphasis that mandated two, three, or even four stories. The region’s population boom squeezed outlying lots into urban dimensions, and suburban demands for family space meant the homes had to grow upward.

These houses revived some good things, such as front porches. But they were driven more by marketing nostalgia as a commodity rather than designing for modern concerns, such as making the best use of light and views and energy and flexible space inside. Developers have learned through long experience that picturesque nostalgia is what sells to the largest number of people.

10 Greatest Homes

The 10 Greatest Homes in Seattle History

Slideshow: Seattle’s 10 Greatest Homes

Slide Show: 10 More Great Houses

Seattle’s 10 Greatest Homes

Web Exclusive

Slideshow: Seattle's 10 Greatest Homes

10 More Great Houses

The Jurors

Q&A with Architect Tom Kundig

Web Exclusives

Tom Kundig’s Shadowboxx

Tom Kundig’s Chicken Point Cabin

Slideshow: Seattle's 10 Greatest Homes

10 More Great Houses

Four Common Seattle Home Styles

The Seattle Box

Midcentury Modern

Bungalows

McMansions

Web Exclusive

10 More Great Houses

Slideshow: Seattle's 10 Greatest Homes