The Artful Designer
Chris Haddad brings to life the modern designs of some of the Northwest’s most desirable homes—when he’s not making sculptures.
George and Laurie Schuchart’s AIA Award-winning Broadmoor home combines Haddad’s two passions.
View Slideshow »
Suyama Peterson Deguchi strove to integrate the Schuchart’s interiors with the exterior elements.
View Slideshow »
Chris Haddad creates in his workshop, shaping a new sculpture in his Hulls series.
View Slideshow »
George and Laurie Schuchart bought a piece from Haddad’s Weapons series, which hangs prominently beside a fireplace.
View Slideshow »
The owners of this Eastside home by Suyama Peterson Deguchi fell in love with Haddad’s Totem No. 1 (seen through the entryway window).
View Slideshow »
The home features the firm’s trademark contemporary Pacific Northwest aesthetic and selective natural materials.
On a Monday morning during the last big push before the Christmas holiday, Chris Haddad leaves his West Seattle home in the predawn darkness for an early flight to Oakland. From the airport, he makes the 90-minute drive to a multimillion-dollar hacienda sprawling on a fecund hilltop in the renowned wine-growing region of Sonoma, California. The house is the fledgling manifestation of several years’ worth of a client’s dreams, a designer’s vision, and a colossal investment—in creative energy and dollars—by both. As the project architect for this home, Haddad is responsible for making it happen. Its design has graduated from a gauzy, schematic phase during which the building’s shape and layout were determined. Haddad has since shepherded it through countless stages of refinement, from generating construction drawings—structural, plumbing, and ventilation specifications—on down to approving the final coat of paint.
Haddad’s professional portfolio as an associate with Suyama Peterson Deguchi puts him at the helm of the firm’s most complicated and ambitious residential commissions with the highest price tags: Two recent projects include a modern interpretation of a large Irish farmhouse estate, built of imported Chinese stone, on a Medina waterfront; and a 3,400-square-foot Seattle home of sculpted concrete, cedar, and glass that transitions into a private golf course.
Since George Suyama began his practice in 1971, his firm has been lauded by colleagues and his international portfolio has collected numerous awards and accolades. Haddad joined Suyama’s staff a decade ago, and, at 39, has gained enough experience and wisdom to direct his own practice. But Haddad is a top-drawer architect who prefers to work from the middle tier.
Tall, rangy, and gray beyond his years, Haddad compresses a full week of work into 30 intense hours at his Belltown office, operating at a frenetic pace that would confound most architects. As a project architect, he conjures reality from inspiration while figuring out how all of the pieces fit together. “In terms of a gross analogy,” he says, “I’m the quarterback and George is the coach…. George might say, ‘Look at the site for this house and figure out how the topography will work with the grading to get the driveway up to it.’” In addition to being the primary contact between Suyama and the client, Haddad is also responsible for evaluating zoning restrictions and code requirements, managing fees and budgets, weaving together work and delivery schedules, selecting the contractors, monitoring their work, composing progress reports—and resolving any problems along the way. On a single project, this process can last years. It is stressful, exhausting work, but Haddad prefers the front line to a corner office.
“The most fulfilling thing is watching this space you’ve designed take shape,” Haddad says. “It’s exciting when you finally stand in what you helped envision and create.”
As a child in Boston, Haddad loved to draw. He was heavily influenced by time spent sailing with his mother and father, and boats became a frequent subject of his drawings. Feeling some parental pressure to direct his creative impulses toward employability, he toyed with becoming a naval architect but found there was a limited demand for such services. As an undergraduate at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, Haddad drifted back toward his early passion. “I was taking physics and math classes, thinking I was going to be an architect or an engineer, but the art just kept pulling me.” A teacher introduced Haddad to sculpture and he declared an art major in his sophomore year. But he still worried about making a living. “Even though physics and calculus were painful for me,” he says, “I eventually decided, ‘All right, I’m going to go on to architecture school.’” When he enrolled in graduate studies at Syracuse University (“It was an awful town, but they had a great architecture program”), the rigors of design education left no time for sculpture. “Architecture school is brutal,” he says. “Professors would take the models you’d worked on for weeks, rip them apart, and put them back together their own way. Students would cry.”
Haddad persevered and, after graduating, moved to Seattle in 1994 in pursuit of a relationship that eventually fizzled. But he enjoyed the contrast between New England and the Pacific Northwest; his new city struck him as “young and energized with lots of creative people,” and he soon took a job as a draftsperson in Ben Trogdon’s firm. “He didn’t have much experience at that point,” Trogdon says, “but I saw a good creative mind. I had him assembling construction documents, learning how to get projects built, and he was exemplary—like a sponge drinking in all he could. It’s rare that someone can sustain that kind of energy and devotion after spending so many hours in a design office.” But the attraction Haddad felt to sculpture was too much to marginalize, so he quit and made a bargain with himself on the spot. “I decided I was going to spend time with sculpture,” Haddad says. “But I would also send my résumé to the only four design offices doing work that got my attention. If they weren’t interested, I’d just work on sculpture and find a job when I needed more money…. I was kind of hoping I wouldn’t get an offer.”
It was a bold and charming plan, but Haddad’s days as an architect had just begun. Suyama Peterson Deguchi was one of the firms he had solicited—and they were hiring immediately.
“We were very busy,” says architect Jay Deguchi, “and we needed someone to crank out detailed drawings in a hurry.” “And without a whole bunch of supervision,” adds George Suyama. “We’d seen his portfolio and the drawings he’d accomplished for Ben’s office and felt confident he’d be able to do that.”
It was trial by fire, but Haddad performed so well that his workload never slackened, and today, a decade later, the partners continue to send him into the fray.
Published: March 2008