Practical Magic
Fun with form and function in a Ravenna bungalow.
The centerpiece of the backyard junglescape is a custom fire feature.
View Slideshow »From the street, the house looks like a pretty, but typical, Seattle bungalow.
View Slideshow »Corson’s Drip lamp brings light and whimsy to gray winter days.
View Slideshow »To design the kitchen, the sculptor combined his artistic aesthetic with a love of practical design.
View Slideshow »Stugger works at his home office, which in the evening becomes a casual hangout space for dinner guests.
View Slideshow »The couple populates the yard with tropical plants that can survive cold climes.
View Slideshow »Corson admits to an obsession with wild ferns.
IT’S A CLOUDLESS LATE-SUMMER MORNING, and sunlight streams through the living-room windows of Dan Corson’s Ravenna home. Corson, a sculptor and installation artist whose pieces often involve laser-lit zigzags, powers up his creation _Drip_—a standing lamp featuring a gaggle of appendages from which dangle medical IV bags heavy with fiber-optic-enhanced resin. When he turns the apparatus on, the bags emit a soft indigo glow that, after a moment, transitions to mint green. The light bounces around the room, but there are few shadows for it to play against on this bright day. Laughing, Corson hits a switch and the bags go clear. This work was designed for grayer skies.
A California native, Corson already had a degree in theatrical design when he moved to Seattle two decades ago to attend graduate school for sculpture. In 2000, he purchased this 99-year-old bungalow with his partner Berndt Stugger, renovation plans dancing in his head. As you might expect from an art and theater guy, Corson approaches the remodel, which he sees as ongoing and subject to his evolving whims, with an experimental attitude and a keen but idiosyncratic sense of space. Much of the design he does on his own, working informally with professional architects and engineers as needed. When it came time to overhaul the kitchen, he bounced ideas off of two friends: Seattle architects Lorri Nelson and Nicole Portieri. His main collaborator, however, was pal Carsten Stinn of Carsten Stinn Architecture. It was Stinn who took Corson’s drawings and converted them into CAD files for the builders.
In the end, though, the builders used Corson’s original sketches to guide their work: His methods may not be industry standard, but a certain practicality clearly prevails inside the Corson brain. The stove hood he designed in the kitchen, for example, looks like a mounted sculpture, but it is not art for art’s sake. An enormous, bugle-shaped piece of sheet metal, the hood is designed to suck air up and out from the stove even when the fan inside is not on, cutting down on both noise and energy use. The sleek cabinets, meanwhile, are constructed from acid-etched mirror. The material has an enchanting way of reflecting light, but also resists finger smudges and other stains. Electrical outlets, which Corson says he considers an eyesore, are tucked away under shelves. And in place of light switches, Corson and Stinn installed a touch pad, six feet long and two inches wide, below a row of windows lining the side wall.
Corson approaches the remodel with an experimental attitude and a keen but idiosyncratic sense of space.
Painstakingly planned shelves and drawers stow appliances to allow the terrazzo countertops—which Corson embedded with light-emitting diodes—to remain bare at all times. When the artist slaps the electric touch pad, the LEDs wash the room in purplish incandescence, reminding guests that beneath all the functionalism lurks an artist with a passion for light games.
Published: November 2008
