Dressed Down
Casual counters the crazy of our contemporary life
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 PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF THE TAUNTON PRESS A breezeway offers some separation between the house and guest rooms, and a quiet spot to daydream.
PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF THE TAUNTON PRESS A courtyard separating the master suite and kitchen brings light deep into the house and provides a private indoor-outdoor spot that is sheltered from cold wind off Puget Sound yet open to the view and sky. The Franklands like to have lunch here.
PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF THE TAUNTON PRESS The long back porch serves as a covered boardwalk between the main house and the guest rooms, making it usable rain or shine.
PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF THE TAUNTON PRESS "The Barefoot Home: Dressed-down Design for Casual Living" published by The Taunton Press.
PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF THE TAUNTON PRESS The house, 22 feet by 100 feet, faces west, sitting between forest and water; windows on each side offer different perspectives. "It was designed to age with us; it's comfortable and one level," Bill Frankland says of the Bainbridge Island home they built in 1987.
PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF THE TAUNTON PRESS "Wherever we are is our favorite room," Jean Frankland says. "But we hang out at the little table in our kitchen a lot." |
OH, SIGH. HERE we are, on the very edge of the cutting edge once again.
Turns out the Next Big Thing in home design is the informal house. This from the recently released "The Barefoot Home: Dressed-down Design for Casual Living" published by The Taunton Press ($30). This informality thing is a trend, the book says. And author Marc Vassallo, who co-wrote the acclaimed "Inside the Not So Big House" with Sarah Susanka, knows from trends.
But our temperate, outdoorsy little pocket of the country has been dressing down and putting its feet up since the Denny party hit our muddy shores in 1851. So this is something we can graciously help the uptight others with.
Six of the 23 homes featured in the book as cutting-edge casual are in the Northwest. Those we left Back East find themselves burdened with Important Center Hallways that divide homes and smallish double-hung windows hidden behind screens and storm windows, and even further cloaked in drapes and shades.
The formal house, in all its trussed-up glory, can seem more like a cage than a home. And that's just not going to work anymore. Our homes of casual contemporary comfort are the counterbalance to the high-tech, high-stress world in which we live. We are finally catching up to Frank Lloyd Wright, who paved the way in the 1950s with the Usonian houses.
'The Barefoot Home' basics
Author Marc Vassallo lists five characteristics shared by nearly all barefoot houses:
1. Informality. No special-occasion rooms. We are to "think informal thoughts, embrace a barefoot state of mind."
2. Openness. Be able to move easily from room to room. Cook, eat and live in one big space.
3. Light. Welcome the sun. Let it pour in through skylights, verandas and transom windows. Curl up in a window seat, stroll down an open colonnade.
4. Texture. Wrap up in texture. Feel the warmth around you.
5. Indoor-Outdoor Connection. Live outside as well as in. Easy flow back and forth. Open entire walls to the outdoors. Let floors slip seamlessly onto the deck.
Sounds like the primer for Northwest architecture, doesn't it?
The kitchen, media room, backyard barbecue, living rooms that pour onto patios — that's where we live.
Take Bainbridge Islanders Bill and Jean Frankland, for example. The Franklands, 79, have traded in their formal Laurelhurst life of golf and tennis dates, three stories of antiques, white carpets and floral-print sofas. Now life is about gardening and reading, and living in their light-filled island getaway full time.
Shoes have become optional.
"It feels like you're outside all the time because of all the windows," Jean says. She worked with William Overholt Interiors to create simple interiors with pine furniture, light wood floors and French country blues and whites, complementing the casual sky-and-water property.
Theirs is a classic barefoot house, and the first one featured in the book.
The forest-on-one-side-Sound-on-the-other house, designed by Seattle architect Tom Bosworth of Bosworth Hoedemaker, has stood the informal test of time since it was built in 1987.
"We had kind of a kooky requirement," Bill says of the eight acres that have been in his family since 1940. "We tore down another house we used for a lot of years. It was kind of an old farmhouse. It had a large dining room that looked west and had a great big table in it. We had more fun in that dining room. So when we built this house we had to have a dining room that looked west, had a great big table in it and windows with panes."
So that is what Bosworth did.
Along with bringing in light, light and more light. He created a long, narrow structure of about 2,200 square feet that draws in light from two sides in the middle and three on the ends. Down the center of the one-room-wide house, light monitors are located over the kitchen, master bath and guest wing. The master suite is separated from the public spaces by an open courtyard; the guest wing is separated from the master suite by a covered patio. The courtyard is loosely based on a Renaissance palazzo and aids in traffic flow with a hallway of windows. It also provides a third source of light for the master suite. Porches line the house front and back, coaxing the outside in.
"We have woods or water absolutely everyplace," Jean says. And sky in every room.
The Franklands say summer is their season, when their three married children and five grandchildren can gather on the island. They love the beach and boating, and spend hours in the yard gardening.
There's only one glitch in this otherwise perfect picture.
"We're Seattleites," says Jean, "and we spend a lot of time on the ferry."
Rebecca Teagarden is assistant editor of Pacific Northwest magazine.
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