Seattle Homes & Lifestyles’ Home of the Year contest is kind of like Christmas. We set a deadline, send out an announcement and then we wait. Slowly, the entries trickle in … usually with a rush just a day or so before the deadline. And then we get to open each one, admire all of the photographs and marvel at the quality of the designs, furnishings and architecture. Next, we remove all information about who entered the project or who owns the home and copy the entries into a folder to share with our panel of judges, who view the entries anonymously.
This year’s judges were Linda Humphrey, SH&L market adviser and city editor for Metropolitan Home; architect Aaron Mollick from Stuart Silk Architects; and interior designer and 2007 Design Achievement Award honoree Paul Devon Raso. They reviewed the entries and discussed each home’s merits and limitations. This year’s winning entry was the unanimous choice of all three judges. Raso called it, "individualistic," and Mollick praised it for not being "heavy-handed."
Professional photographers can make things look different than they do in real life—better, usually, but also sometimes bigger (or smaller) than they really are. An example of this accompanies writer and designer Randy Altig’s article about setting a holiday table.
Photograph by Hank Drew
We didn’t worry about what it would take to replicate his entire dining room in the photo studio. Photographer Hank Drew and SH&L art director Shawn Williams are pros at all of this. Under their direction, Randy—with some help from the folks at J.Z. Rose in Bellevue—put together just a corner of this holiday table. The photo above (shhhhh …) shows what it really looked like in the studio.
Also in this issue are an elegant home in Laurelhurst and a playful, window-rich teahouse in Ballard. Our Style Editor, Virginia Bunker, suggests unexpected gifts, reveals trends in screen prints and reports on the latest sofa designs.
SH&L is hunting for a holiday decorating makeover for our December 2009 Room for Improvement page. Send us before-and-after holiday decor photos of a room in your home and maybe we’ll send our photographer out to take a professional shot to appear in the magazine next year.
Giselle Smith, Editor
gisellesmith@seattlehomesmag.com