Seattle’s 10 Greatest Homes

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

Architect: George Suyama of Suyama Peterson Deguchi

Year Built: 2003

Fauntleroy Residence, 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

Queen Anne (Demolished)

Year Built: 1888

David Thomas Denny Residence, 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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Published: January 2012