A United Front

Head, heart and soul blend in one carefully crafted expression

AND NOW FOR something completely different. Today we stray from our usual repartee to bring you the Magnolia home and thoughts of Mark Bloome. He can tell you about his place better than anyone. That's because every piece of slate is turned just so, every leaf positioned to catch the light, every room the right size for its purpose. Bloome is all heart and head and soul about it, too. Often all at once. Fools, however, will not be suffered. He's not Buddha or Confucuis or Groucho Marx. But Mark Bloome is right in there. Wise man and wise guy.

He's given a lot of thought to the vagaries of modern living. His environment is all about the environment as namesake of the Mark and Sharon Bloome Foundation. And the organic property is his intimate solution to finding peace in our time.

So, with as little interruption as possible, here is Mark Bloome, grandfather, husband of Sharon, marching enthusiastically about his property in his blue T-shirt, green shorts and boat shoes, espousing the place he calls "Unity: Man, God and Nature":

"We've been working on this project forever. We moved to Seattle 20 odd years ago. I found it my second day here. The energy shift was amazing! You get that? If you get that, there's nothing else I have to tell you.

"The property is my piece of installation art. We're currently remodeling the garden." The garden is everything outside the house.

"I came upon a house in grand disrepair," he says. "But I saw the energy and the location. Wow! This place is magical! I said it was going to take imagination and resources. My wife said, 'I'm not going to live there.' "

He struck a deal: She'd get the house she wanted, but he'd run the project.

At the streetside entrance, high over house and beach: "We bring you first into this hut. The compression zone. It closes you in, it says nothing." Then you open the door and you feel the shift.

Taking a few of the 125 steps down to the house, he pauses, sweeps his arm across wood and water, "This is what I call the negligee effect. When you can see everything . . . it's boring."

At Unity: Man, God and Nature, he says, "we're dealing with these forces and the contradition of these forces. A natural garden is the hardest garden because it has to be tended so subtly.

"The garden is a spiritual unfolding: fire (the color of the home), air, water, earth.

"The rocks are all sculptures. Behind each one is steel, rebar, pressure-treated wood. We let nature speak to us. We had to build up this hillside."

That's because about 10 years ago there was a massive slide. "I wept when the garden came down. It was a death-and-birth process. I then had to make it more beautiful. As an art piece there's a secret tension, just how technical this is and how natural it is."

That may explain why he says "I don't believe in a garden you should have things that say, 'Hello! I'm a chair!' " He bought the rustic wooden chairs for his hidden grotto at Costco, painted them deep brown. "They just disappear! You bring your book, you bring your drink. It's like the best resort in town!" arms waving, voice full of affection. "We don't go anywhere."Of the front door — a huge redwood slab taken from a stump — he says, "We let the grain tell the story of nature."

Inside, "The whole house speaks to the inner and outer life of spirituality. The yin and the yang. The dark and the light.

"The reason it looks so natural is because we worked so hard." They also worked hard at being cost effective, he says, while admitting "you can't do anything like this cheaply."

In creating the house, "everybody won some and lost some. Including me."

Every view is controlled. "All trimming is done very precisely so the trees look absolutely natural. That is part of the art. Form is crucial."

Nothing is haphazard. The powder room has a dinner-napkin chute. Each room is individually temperature-controlled. Sliders in glass and steel reconfigure the house as needed. Bloome has been collecting art for 30 years and owns a delicate Morris Graves painting, Narcissus Quagliata stained glass, a Jim Dine sculpture of Venus in wood.

"I collect art, I'm not a collector of names. That is what I think is the essence of collecting; 25 percent of my pieces are by known people to very familiar people, 75 percent are totally unknown."

Each room, he says, is a piece of art, too. "I wanted this house to be an icon of transformative ideas. How to live in great beauty but be living in less, because if we don't learn that, we are doomed in a flat world.

"We're trying to be creative, but everything, of course, is derivative.

"We're facing the West but bowing to the East. There's an appreciation for the Japanese without kowtowing to it.

"Notice there are no hallways in this house. That's because hallways are an absolute waste of space. This house flows!"

Finally, he says, "it all comes from a vision of the heart. The head supports the vision of the heart."

Rebecca Teagarden is assistant editor of Pacific Northwest magazine. She can be reached at bteagarden@seattletimes.com. Mike Siegel is a Seattle Times staff photographer.