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Cover Story By Rebecca Teagarden
Getting down to itIn the name of living simpler and better, we're shrinking our spaces
"I CLEAN THE house in half an hour and go do something fun. Why do I need more than what I have here?" That is today's question, put quite succinctly by Jenny Kogan, who lives in a 950-square-foot box of a house in the Bryant neighborhood of Seattle. And I hear it more and more from owners of the Northwest's most cutting-edge custom homes. "Notice that we don't have a workout room. You can go outside and run. There's no media room. Read a book. It's a home. People get so carried away with spaces you have to have. You don't." That was from Laurie Schuchart, speaking of her new and architecturally significant George Suyama home in Broadmoor. Homeowners are saying, "Enough already!" An offering of 300-square-foot Belltown condominiums recently sold out in less than a week. Maybe bigger isn't better — a point well made at the bottom of a circular metal staircase in one of last summer's Street of Dreams villas: the "man cave." And this in a home with two kitchens. But even that annual show has felt a change in the home-design air. The 11,000-square-foot megamansions are out this year. "Upscale bungalows, cottages or prairie farmhouses" are in. The event "is transforming itself," its Web site warns. "Larger building sites are becoming so scarce due to the escalating costs to produce a buildable home site . . . So for '07 we're focusing on 'less is more . . .' " So what's up with the downsize? Certainly, housing prices fat with zeros, the push toward high-density housing, environmental health and baby boomers clearing out for the senior years. But new, smaller living spaces by the region's top architects encompass more than that. And this evolution from conspicuous consumption is bringing an elevation in Northwest architecture. Seattle architect Lane Williams believes architects here are on the forefront of downsizing. "Conspicuous consumption was never as popular as in other portions of the country," he says. "But I've been reading a book recently on consumerism and how it's passed all the other isms — communism, socialism. And in our own country I think we're finally beginning to realize the effect of that on ourselves and our world. "A minority of us are starting to know we can't live like that. It's a price our children will have to pay." Living with less and doing it better are what architects wrestle with now. "I hope people don't regard downsizing and sustainable building as a trend. That puts it in the category of feng shui. It's here to stay. And it's only going to continue to grow," Williams says. "For economic or other reasons, we are going to be forced to live differently than we were just a few short years ago." Following are four examples of people who are living smaller and smarter. Three have been featured in the magazine for their design and innovation. Today we revisit these homes to find out about the lives there. The downtown Seattle condominium is new. The homes range from 736 to 2,700 square feet, but downsizing is not just a numbers game. It's personal. CITY LIVIN' YOU MIGHT NOT think that moving to a 2,700-square-foot condominium with two bedrooms and 3 ½ bathrooms is downsizing. But it is if the Broadmoor mid-century contemporary you moved from was 3,500 square feet with four bedrooms, four baths and two big living rooms. "I loved the house, but it just had too many memories of Nancy," says Frank Stagen, who sought a downtown condo after the death of his wife. His two children are grown. Stagen, vice chairman and CEO of the development company Nitze-Stagen, wanted a warm but uncluttered home, and, contrary to popular opinion, a home with no water view. "I've lived with western views," he says. "The water view is highly overrated. At night the water is dark. And the sun! When I look out here, this is a city. At night when all the lights are on it's magical." And, so, Stagen's north, east and south walls are all glass, 120 feet long. His overriding requirement to architect Eric Cobb was to keep it open so that, from 18 stories up, he could live among the churches, office buildings, train station, Rainier Club and city streets below. From nowhere else has Seattle looked more grown up. "It's a relatively large condominium," Cobb says. "But if you look at what's happening in Seattle, all the people who are moving to these condominiums are downsizing. They're moving from large, expensive houses to smaller spaces that are far more efficient." That's because, in the city, the crowd is building. In 2000, 18,423 people were living downtown, 75 percent more than the decade before. And Seattle expects 100,000 more people by 2024: A third of those will live either downtown, on South Lake Union or Lower Queen Anne Hill. As with the best Northwest architecture, light and the sense of open space are key at the Stagen condo. The three walls of glass are a great start, enhanced with light finishes and subtle, elegant furnishings throughout. The whole effect is, as Stagen puts it, "You're just floating up here." Although this home is larger than the others featured, the same rules apply. "I didn't want to take away from the views with a lot of stuff," says Stagen. A long wall of cabinetry with plain flush doors between the dining room and kitchen does much of the storage work. On the living-room side it houses the bar; in the dining room, the china cabinet, and to the back the pantry storage. As a member of the Frye Art Museum board of directors, Stagen has allowed wall space for his art. Moving downtown has permitted Stagen to park his car and leave it there: "I'm tired of a car. I lived 15 years in Manhattan. I still have an office there. I really like walking to places . . . I feel like I'm much more a part of the city than I ever was before." The downside to this downsize? "You have people near you all the time. You have to abide by the majority, and the noise of remodeling." But then again, "there's the old saying, with a condo you can take a key, close it up and come back in two years." IN THE 'HOOD JENNY KOGAN IS a minimalist modernist. She loves Modern architecture and hates stuff. And right now she feels a little overwhelmed with stuff. "You don't want to see the basement. I don't want to see the basement," she says, sitting in one of two Le Corbusier chairs in the spare and tidy contemporary home she shares with her husband of more than 50 years, Marcos. They have just finished moving their "other" set of books and furniture and utensils from the apartment they kept in Corvallis, Ore., while Marcos finished research as a retired professor of entomology at Oregon State. There, they lived in a multistory suburban spec house with four bedrooms, 2 ½ baths and 2,200 square feet of broken-up living space. Fortunately, their 950-square-foot box here sits on the foundation of the original bungalow, and that bungalow came with a full, dry basement. "It's been a lifesaver, I tell you," Marcos says. With Jenny's aversion to the extraneous, this overload is temporary. But the basement storage is key to keeping the upstairs spare. It will serve them well for Marcos' microscopes, Christmas wrap, a full washer and dryer and a small freezer. "For a while we had two houses, and I would think, 'Where did I buy the breakfast cereal?' But moving is very healthy. It makes you re-evaluate: Do I need that?" The Kogans, 73, moved to Bryant to be near their daughter, her husband and their grandson, Benny. The Griggses live just around the corner. "Not everyone can live as lean as you do," Doris Griggs says to her mother. "There are some people who get a lot of pleasure and comfort from their stuff, through their collections." The Kogans, who are from Brazil, are used to living among contemporary structures of all kinds. They wanted an easy-to-manage, light and open modern home on a budget of about $220,000. (They exceeded that by 30 percent.) Designed by architect Eric Cobb, their home is the smallest he has done by far, but he and other architects say they like the challenge of getting a lot out of a little. In the Kogan house, for example, the office space becomes a sleeping space for guests. But how is their compact home (one bedroom, great room, office/guest area, 1 ½ baths) working out? "I think it's a little more space than we need, like the bookshelves," Jenny says. "A good thing to do with books is keep a box in the trunk of the car and barter for books at the stores that buy them back." Echoing her architect, her motto is, "If it takes floor space, it has to do double duty." The bathroom features cubbies for the ironing board and laundry storage. The 2-foot-wide Bosch washer and dryer there also serve as the hamper. The real advice here, Marcos says, "is don't accumulate stuff just to accumulate it. Over time it will cost you time and money." RURAL RESPITE IF A PRIZE WERE to be given out for the couple who lived happily in the smallest space, Sylvia Matlock and Ross Johnson of Vashon Island would be the winners. No question. For 18 years, after long days spent as the owners of DIG Home and Garden, Matlock and Johnson went home to a 384-square-foot Pan Abode cabin in the woods. Theirs, however, is a story of adding onto within the downsized lifestyle. A year ago they built a room they call the conservatory while remodeling the rest — 352 square feet more for a new grand total of 736 on their 1 ½-acre steep-bank waterfront property. The upsized downsize wasn't about more space. "We wanted light, but we didn't want more stuff," Matlock says. "It's not for everyone. But people are shocked that it's comfortable. We simply wanted one more room, a place where we can sit and have a meal. It feels really luxurious." That one more room is used as the dining and living rooms, office, music studio and reading room. The remodel involved the couple, Vashon architect Christopher Ezzel, and engineer and designer friend Robert Rosenbaum, who works with Vashon Household, a group that builds affordable housing on the island. The conservatory is a see-through polycarbonate with ceilings up to 14 feet. Metal windows completely open, and oversized doors fold away to welcome porches made of cast-iron welding tables. The floors throughout are heated Brazilian slate. Two times they had plans drawn up for much larger houses. "Both were almost twice the square footage," Johnson says. "By then our garden had been developed," Matlock adds, finishing his thought. "We went, 'Wait a minute, this looks fantastic! Why take it up with house space?' " A stigma is still attached to the little home, but Matlock and Johnson couldn't care less. "When we go out to dinner with people everyone talks about their house. Then they give the square footage of their house. They get around to us and they just look at us, kind of with pity." Matlock points out that better detail was more affordable at this size. The dishwasher and range hood are Miele, the refrigerator Sub-Zero, the oven Viking and the stacked washer and dryer ASKO. So, how do they keep down clutter that could quickly grow to avalanche proportions in such a small house? "Because we love the place, you make a point of putting things in the right place," Matlock says. "We have a little beautiful plate that we put our mail on. When we open it we disperse it to the right places, our briefcases. I'm a big fan of magazines. I put them in an armoire, and I just close the door. I put them away in an artful piece." Speaking of the 6-foot closet they share, Matlock asks, "How many clothes do you need? Whatever we bought we decided would be of the highest caliber or most loved to come into this house. "The cabinet in our bathroom, the guy wanted to make the drawers bigger. I told him no! Then I'll fill them up. Do you really need 10 of those different hand creams?" And the sacrifices? "If I had a choice, I would have about 300 or 400 china collections — Fiestaware, Spode, whatever. I would just go crazy," Matlock says. "But because our house is so small I have to limit myself to just one set. You have to bow to what the house is telling you to do. That's part of the fun." Do they find their half-metal, half-polycarbonate house to be true to the spirit of Northwest architecture? "I do," Matlock says. "I think a lot of people are thinking about resources and thinking green, and there haven't been that many examples set that way. I think people are starting to really react . . . But you have to have a vocabulary to make those decisions. That's why we were so involved in what we did." LIVE/WORK MILTON MCCRUM and Paula Whelan moved two years ago not so they could live in a beautiful, contemporary home designed by Lane Williams. They already had that. Not so they could be intimately involved in the construction of their home. They'd already done that. And not so they could live on Queen Anne. They already lived there. McCrum and Whelan bought the old Brenneke School of Massage building on Roy Street so they could live and work in one place. They sold their 2,400-square-foot award-winning Lane Williams-designed home on the top of the hill and over 1 ½ years built a sleek, Williams-designed space on the bottom. The first house cost $245,000 to build, the second $910,000 ($550,000 for the building). They were the general contractors and did as much of the work as they could themselves. They now have a stunning 1,800 square feet of living space on two floors that sits over a 980-square-foot optometry studio. It is one of the smallest living spaces Williams' firm, COOP15, has drawn up. McCrum and Whelan's first home was designed to accommodate Milton's two daughters. Now, "we have features like a guest room that functions most of the time as a den — and we put it on top of Milton's office and gave him the world's shortest commute," Williams says. A lot of people would like to find this, he adds, "but we need zoning that allows more combined home-and-business properties." In their combined space, the couple got just what they wanted: an open living/dining/kitchen with an office/den in the back, 1 ½ bathrooms, a master bedroom and two decks. They walk to the grocery, restaurants, book stores, the dry cleaners and theaters. Whelan, an artist, has become much more involved in McCrum's business, too, designing the office, hiring staff, hunting down the coolest eye-glass frames and overseeing advertising. But there are also noisy late-night bar patrons and smokers in their doorway; they lack storage and green space. This urban pioneer stuff can be tough. "I've had a real positive effect on the business, and it's been a real creative outlet for me," says Whelan, always honest with her feelings. "But I nearly had a nervous breakdown when we moved in. It was a huge loss of privacy. I thought it was the stupidest thing I've ever done. I was also really angry about how much work it was. I was beat to the bone." So they locked up and took a vacation to Mexico. "That definitely helped," McCrum says. McCrum does walk downstairs to work, but just three days a week. The two other workdays he drives to his Everett and Marysville offices. It takes time to transfer a practice, combine offices. But they're getting there. He enjoys the hot tub on the third-floor deck and the big grill on the second-floor deck. "And I don't miss my lawn mower or any of my garden tools," he says. They're not much into clutter: "When you have no place to put it, you don't get it," McCrum says. But they are both project people and sorely miss the space to gather and create. Whelan's paintings are quite large, and her sculptures, often constructed of found objects, require room. They had been using space in McCrum's Marysville office and her SoDo studio. But there is nowhere to stash stuff at 166 Roy. And so, McCrum is building a storage shed out back. They — and their neighborhood — continue to adjust, and grow. Next door, an architect and his wife are remodeling their commercial building for live/work space. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is moving next to the Seattle Center. "It's definitely evolving," Whelan says. And Seattle-area architects and homeowners alike are quickly turning less into high-quality more. Rebecca Teagarden is assistant editor of Pacific Northwest magazine. Benjamin Benschneider is a magazine staff photographer.
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