An eclectic collection of antique chairs surrounds a dining table designed and built by Nathan Rodda, who frequently entertains guests from Seattle's arts community in his Normandy Park cottage.

— "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," by C.S. Lewis

MANY A VISITOR to the home of Nathan Rodda may have felt a little like Lucy Pevensie, C.S. Lewis' brave fictional child who finds herself suddenly adrift in the magic land of Narnia. One summer's day in the country, Lucy steps into a wardrobe full of furs. The next moment she is wandering in a wintry landscape where she meets a charming faun with an armload of brown-paper parcels. What does Lucy do when she reaches the shelter of the cave? Sensible girl that she is, she sits down, enjoys her tea and has a good natter with the ebullient Mr. Tummus.

Blazing wood in a stone fireplace, comfortable chairs and pressing invitations to eat, drink and be merry have become familiar to a large cast of friends Rodda has made as a designer working with the Dickens Carolers, Seattle's Gilbert and Sullivan Society, other theater groups and a cadre of admiring individual clients. His rented cottage, built in 1940 as a guest house for a larger home on the wooded Normandy Park property, occupies something less than 500 square feet. That fazes Rodda not at all.

Sturdily mounted votive candles flicker in the heavily decked "tree," and can last safely through two evenings of entertaining. Antique papier mache toys cluster on the mantel Rodda built to coordinate with the armoires on either side.

A concealed silver drawer emerges from the cornice of one armoire. Aside from color, the common element of the ceramic collection is that each piece is hand-painted.

Never mind that the Lilliputian bathroom doubles as a pantry, that the kitchen is 6-feet-by-6, and that more than a dozen people are arriving for dinner tonight. "Come in, come in," Rodda shouts, dashing out to stash a salad bowl on the chilly porch as his guests straggle over the brick walkway past a perennial garden graceful even in frost. Soon everyone has shed coats, cell phones and anxieties, their eyes adjusting to the gentle glow of candles on every side.

And really it was a wonderful tea. There was a nice brown egg, lightly boiled, for each of them, and then sardines on toast, and then buttered toast, and then toast with honey, and then a sugar-topped cake. And when Lucy was tired of eating, the Faun began to talk . . .

In Nathan Rodda's version of Narnia, the talking commences well before any substantial food materializes, and continues even when the multicourse dinner has been whisked from oven, porch, refrigerator and stovetop onto a table magically grown to several times its original size. The functional legerdemain, involving the shifting of a wing chair and the insertion of numerous leaves in the dining table designed and constructed by Rodda himself, requires a brief deployment of troops. Some of the guests are invited to step outside for a few moments to enjoy some fresh air, but most are pressed into service placing silver flatware and napkins, ferrying individual, lidded Chinese rice bowls filled with carrot ginger soup to the table, or assembling the dining chairs tucked in various corners of the main living area.

"I think of life in theatrical terms," says Rodda, who has a fine-arts degree from the University of Washington. An observant (and sated) guest might gaze around the cottage for a few minutes and begin to note the effort behind the effect. The six soft lights in the candelabra overhead, for instance, are adjusted by rheostat to match the glow from the actual candles in the room, so as not to jar the impression that nothing here relies on electricity. Gentle classical music fills the air from no discernible source, generated by a stereo system housed in one of several knotty pine cabinets Rodda built to fit the space.

Long before he began to work with form, color and design on the grand scale of Gilbert and Sullivan, Rodda showed a fascination with both mechanics and ornamental detail. Given a block of modeling clay in second grade, he created a grandfather clock complete with tiny pendulum swinging from a long hair scrounged from the girl at the desk behind him.

A clock on the glass cupboard at upper left is a memento of a high-school arts project; an antique clock face, upper right, awaits eventual use. The paneled bed enclosure, modeled on traditional Scandinavian style, features a rosy-shaded light with a dimmer to enhance the effect of candlelight.

More than two decades ago, Rodda took up residence in his current home, where trussed beams of fir run under a cedar roof above the main living area. (Kitchen and bathroom are tucked in at the side.) Beyond the windows, the garden of the large property — for which Rodda's father served as the original landscaper in the 1940s — beckons summer guests to mingle on the grass beneath a stand of magnificent evergreens. But the structure itself, which looks and feels like a cross between an English cottage and a mountain cabin, really comes into its own when the days shorten and the holiday season arrives.

That's when Rodda climbs a ladder beside the vast chimney of his rustic stone fireplace to construct a most theatrical Christmas tree. Artificial garlands of greens, mounted on a triangular wooden frame, provide the backdrop for swags of red watered-silk fabric twined with strands of shimmering beads.

As with Narnia, in the world of this enchanted cottage time takes its own sweet, whimsical way. Given the hurly-burly of the season, and his own performance commitments as a top-hatted caroler, Rodda avoids entertaining at all until after New Year's Day. At that point, his guests find themselves joyfully free to accept an invitation, and soon are taking careful steps through winter darkness toward the glow of firelight and friendship.

Lucy thought she had never been in a nicer place.

Karen Mathieson is a writer and musician in Seattle. Benjamin Benschneider is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff photographer.