Stylistic quirks and physical imperfections are part of the house's charm. Cutler had the original cabin raised on cribbing and made it part of the second floor 25 years ago, when he was a budding architect on a tight budget. The result is certainly not typical of his professional work, but it's home.

Jim Cutler has an international architecture practice and a portfolio of enviable residential projects such as Bill Gates' massive family compound.

He also has designed a number of public or mixed-use buildings, including the Bloedel Reserve's Virginia Merrill Bloedel Education Center on Bainbridge Island. The elegant post-and-beam structure brought Cutler's firm many honors, including a coveted American Institute of Architects National Honor Award for 1993.

Though his Winslow-based firm, Cutler Anderson Architects, is a hive of activity, Cutler likes to keep things simple at home. He always has.

Cutler had degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, where he blossomed in architect Louis I. Kahn's postgraduate studio, when he and his first wife, Pam, bought a wooded acre of high-bank waterfront on Bainbridge Island in 1976. An old cabin with privy was there, tucked among the cedars. House movers put the shack up on cribbing so Cutler could add plumbing, wiring and a lower floor. The remodeled cabin has been his home ever since.
 

Architect Jim Cutler, who is known for his refined and detail-oriented designs, also appreciates the rustic side of life. Here, he sits in a tree on a platform his daughters hammered together to serve as a violinist's dais for his wedding last fall.

"Louis Kahn had this depth of insight into the human condition," Cutler says during a walk around his property on a recent day. In Kahn's studio, "You had to delve right to the core, right to the beginning of what generates the work — or what generates our lives — and then you went to clothe it. He taught me how to search for the meaning, every time."

The practical meanings for Cutler's house included thrift and conservation. By necessity, most materials were salvaged. He bought everything he could out of the old Society Candy Building near the Seattle ferry landing before it was torn down.

"Notice the size of these hideous windows," he says cheerfully, pointing to the upper-floor exterior. "You know, they're pretty bad. All 2-foot-10-and-three-quarters because the original windows were the candy counters out of the store. And then, of course, over time the single-glazed, beveled-glass counters were a problem, so I pulled them out."

The house, which Cutler shares with his wife, Beth Wheeler, and Lucy, the youngest of his three daughters, has the character of a classic Northwest island cabin, with cedar-shingle siding, mossy roof and rustic stick furniture on the porch.
 

		Twenty-five years ago this month, The Seattle Times Pictorial, predecessor of this magazine, ran this photograph of Jim Cutler with the cabin in an early stage of the remodel, which he completed while scrambling for work as an architect.

If he were starting over, he'd create a stronger relationship between the house and landscape. "My yard is one of my favorite places in the world. It's exactly the right size." The patch of lawn by the house and the grass niche up in the woods — the volleyball court — accommodated 70 wedding guests last year, when he and Beth were married. His girls were bat mitzvahed on the ball court, and "ultimately I think I'll be buried there."

The house is not so interesting, he says. "It really is just the place where we live." But it also gave him his big break. In 1978, while he and Pam were working on the house, an organizer for the Bainbridge home tour asked if they'd like to be included. "I said sure, that sounds like great advertising."

Soon, he agreed to a spread in The Seattle Times Pictorial. Learning it would be photographed in just two weeks, "I figured out where every photo would be and finished those areas. I got three or four projects out of that. It launched my career."

It's a cozy house. The front door opens to a modest entryway. A galley-style kitchen is to the right, and the living room is a few steps away. Straight ahead, a stairway leads up to three bedrooms and a bathroom. The girls' rooms resemble snug tree houses. The master bedroom has an enclosed window seat that juts out like a miniature balcony over the living room, with fir shutters to channel heat from downstairs.
 

The wood-burning stove recently replaced a large river-rock fireplace, which overpowered the living room and wasn't very efficient. Shutters, top right, admit heat and light to the master bedroom.

"When the third child came, I tore off the old bathroom (upstairs) and framed up that whole back by myself over a summer," Cutler says. Over the years, he's made other changes, mostly to the living room and kitchen, updated within the past two years.

In the compact living room, fir shelving braces the south wall and a clerestory window high above brightens the area, which opens to the dining space and kitchen.

"In another three weeks, you can't see out of these lower windows," Cutler says from the living room. "This is basically a wall of green, enclosed, even though it's a tall space."

The house faces west to catch light glancing off the Port Orchard arm of Puget Sound. Brownsville marina is visible at night from the master bedroom, as is distant Keyport.

Cutler gives the living room so-so marks. "I had a structural engineer in graduate school who had this great phrase. He said, 'An inch doesn't mean very much between here and Chicago, but on the end of your nose, it's a lot.' If this room had been 8 inches wider, it would have been much better."

Cutler's office is through a doorway just off the entry. When he looks up from his desk, he sees trees and water. When he glances around him, he's surrounded by family. Framed photos fill a wall: his father as a young boy in Russia, some group shots of his 30 or so first cousins, a multi-image self-portrait of his middle daughter, Eliza, who is a photography student at Pratt Institute.

He tends to bring work home, sketching details for thick project books until late at night. Often he serves as his firm's concept person, setting a project's goals by discerning and harmonizing relationships among the environment, materials and client. That involves scouting building-site elevations and coming home with muddy boots, which Cutler relishes.
 

	The west-facing view from the front porch is toward the Brownsville marina. Clouds obscure the Olympic Mountain Range in the distance.

Rooted to his land and family, Cutler has filled his house with objects precious to him. Besides framed art, there are lots of pencil holders, thanks to his girls' school ceramic projects, and fossils, because he likes their looks. The most elegant specimen is an iguana-sized mineralized skeleton in stone mounted on the kitchen wall. "I bought that right after we won the Gates project. I was feeling flush, so I bought a dinosaur."

One of his treasures is a matted and framed crab claw, so small you need to get close to make it out. Eliza found it. It's solid quartz inside.

To Cutler, fossils are a reminder of life's tenacity. "Life is just so beautiful — even the really, really painful parts, which I've certainly had my share of. A lot of our work is based on trying to set examples for how to coexist with the natural world, as opposed to molding things in our image."

Indeed, Cutler's buildings are a refined Northwest aesthetic, rich in detail, inventive, modern and respectful of nature. His preferred materials are Douglas fir (recycled, if possible), concrete, steel and stone. His buildings' bones are often visible, so his projects demand sublime craftsmanship.

He thinks his best work is the Salem Witch Trials Tercentenary Memorial in Salem, Mass., which commemorates the trials and executions of 20 innocent people accused of witchcraft in 1692. He worked with Bainbridge Island artist Maggie Smith on that project, which earned another AIA National Honor Award for 1994. "When people go there, they weep."

In a letter directed to architects in Architectural Record's online journal a couple of years ago, he wrote that ". . . responding to, revealing, reflecting, and protecting the uniqueness of the real world around us should be our highest calling."

In his work and at home, that's what Jim Cutler does.