One of the amazing things about working at Seattle Homes & Lifestyles is the chance to visit so many beautiful homes and hear their stories. While we learn about many of the houses we feature through design professionals (architects and interior designers, for example), we also often get to meet the current owners. And, because a lot of the homes we publish are new construction, we sometimes hear their entire histories from the people who commissioned them, designed them, built them and decorated them.
But when we run stories about older homes that have been remodeled or renovated, those houses have all kinds of stories that we often don’t hear-stories of past owners, other renovations and sometimes even former architects and builders whose names are unknown to a home’s current owners.
On rare occasions, we learn more about a home after we publish an article about it-and this was the case with the Queen Anne home once owned by Seattle design icon Jean Jongeward, which we featured in our January/February 2009 issue. After the story was printed, we were surprised and pleased to receive an e-mail from a woman, now living in California, who purchased the house from Jongeward’s estate. She and her late husband hired San Francisco architect and designer Nestor Matthews of Matthews Studio to renovate the house and repair the ravages of time. Matthews, and Seattle-based builders SBC Construction, remodeled the kitchen, master bedroom and living room, and added the main floor terrace and courtyard.
Like a vintage dress, even a well designed older home usually needs some tailoring to make it a perfect fit for a new owner, and that was the case with this beauty. Steven Hensel, the interior designer hired to make the alterations for the home’s current residents, was happy to see that Jongeward’s home had already been restored before his clients purchased it in 2007.
"What they had done was great," recalls Hensel, who designed the current interior look of the home. "We didn’t have to do very much remodeling … they had added the deck, which was breathtaking [and] that courtyard area (designed by David Pfeiffer), which we didn’t touch."
Perhaps it is the mark of a truly great home when it can be tailored to perfectly fit several owners over the course of its long life.
In this issue, we turn our focus to what lies outside a number of homes in the Seattle area, featuring two beautiful gardens that have completely different personalities: a structured garden outside a Mediterranean-style villa on Mercer Island and a lush garden overflowing with foliage, flowers and art year-round in Laurelhurst. We also spotlight the winner of the fourth annual "First in Home and Design" award, which SH&L gives to the Northwest Flower & Garden Show display garden that represents the best ideas in residential garden design. This year’s winner-designed by New Yorker Rebecca Cole-was an urban rooftop garden filled with great ideas for going green.
gsmith@seattlehomesmag.com