PINE NEEDLE SITE
Seattle

An extraordinary transformation took place on this site, in which a traditional early twentieth-century Mediterranean style house was remodeled into a twenty-first century minimalist home, while maintaining its contextual camouflage from the street and neighboring properties.

The house sits at the top of a very steep rockery, on a narrow lot. Though its location provided remarkable privacy in a crowded urban neighborhood, the house had only one “picture” window, and no relationship to exterior space. With the enthusiasm of owner and master-builder Jim Dow, Alchemie proposed a series of bold and simple strategies which would transform a traditional, compartmentalized and inward oriented house into a contemporary home which is connected seamlessly to its surrounding gardens.

The original two-story house had a south facing living room with a subterranean basement below it. The first move was to remove the rockery slope concealing the basement, exposing it to southern light and city views. This permitted the installation of a cantilevered balcony from the former living room, and expanded glass windows on both floors, with the former basement, now the Garden Room, opening onto a new outdoor terrace at grade.

To add additional light and ambience to the stacked Living and Garden Rooms, Alchemie recommended that the west wall of the basement also be excavated to floor level, and that a water bar be placed in this location. This move required the construction of a board-formed concrete wall which begins as a railing wall in the entry court, and then runs south toward the City, ending in a fin wall over twenty feet high. The construction of the extraordinary fin wall and fjord-like water bar allowed us to peel back the western edge of the living room floor, and to insert a two-story window beginning at the water bar and ending at the historic brick arch of a former window. The reflected lambent light of water in this man-made canyon penetrates deep into the house at certain times of the day and night. Even the soaking tub and shower stall in the Master Suite were designed as a part of the exterior water feature Spring Box, erasing the boundary between interior and exterior space.