When Jon Gentry and Lydia Ramsey began fascinated with constructing a house, they didn’t should look far. Mrs. Ramsey already had one place in mind: her grandparents’ wooded estate in Indianola, Washington, near Puget Sound, where she used to play soccer and the soccer her parents inherited.
“My parents live down the road, so I spent quite a lot of my childhood here,” said Mrs. Ramsey, 38, folk singerfondly recalling how the ping-pong table served as each a playing surface and a dining table in her grandparents’ factory home.
“Grandpa at all times had a striking forehand and Grandma at all times had a bit of backhand chop,” she said. “Lots of family love and memories have already been built on this land.”
She and Mr. Gentry, 43, co-founder of an architectural firm GO’Cspent years in Seattle, but were able to put down roots and begin a family. Initially, they considered a half-acre lot in Indianola as a site for a weekend home. But in 2018, a latest ferry began traveling from nearby Kingston to downtown Seattle in 39 minutes. Suddenly, the thought of living there full-time seemed real.
It was a 15-minute bus ride from Indianola to Kingston, which meant Mr. Gentry could commute to his studio in Seattle in about an hour. It seemed doable even before he began working from home more through the pandemic. After Ms Ramsey’s parents gave them a plot of land in 2019, the couple spent a yr drawing up plans and arranging construction funding.
Faced with the potential for designing almost anything, Mr. Gentry was discouraged. “I said to Lydia, ‘OK, you are within the client role and I’m going to do what I do as an architect and present options for you to contemplate,'” he said. “It took some weight off me.”
These options included a wide range of constructing types, from a house with a standard pitched roof to a shed-inspired house. In the top, they selected a modernist house with a flat roof. “We kept coming back to this flat roof that will give us an additional outdoor level upstairs: a raised rooftop garden where we could hang around,” Mr. Gentry said.
The under-roof structure is a 1,700-square-foot single-story box with floor-to-ceiling glass doors and windows that open the structure to light and air. To one side of the home is a big living area comprising a kitchen, dining room and lounge with a solid concrete fireplace and a built-in sofa in an alcove with a skylight. The couple considered constructing a music room for Mrs Ramsey, but decided to ask her songs into the guts of the house by keeping her piano and guitars within the lounge.
On the opposite side of the home is the master bedroom, an additional bedroom and Mr. Gentry’s office. He also added structural elements able to supporting a second floor above the bedrooms in case they ever desired to expand.
Glass doors can open up a lot of the house to the forest. The remainder of the structure is clad in charcoal-colored brick that extends beyond the home at either end, creating two outdoor spaces: an outside shower off the master bedroom and a wood storage shed that doubles as a comfy whiskey near the lounge.
To bring the prices all the way down to about $600,000, most of which got here from a construction loan, Mr. Gentry and Mrs. Ramsey did a lot of the work themselves. When their builder Wróbel carpentry workshopbegan construction in April 2020, the couple were there alongside the contractors doing a lot of the heavy work.
Mr. Gentry and Mrs. Ramsey built the concrete formwork themselves, from the foundations to the chimney; they cut out some nearby Douglas fir, then ground and finished them in place to cover the inside ceilings and make the kitchen shelves; and Mrs. Ramsey hauled bricks as a mason’s assistant.
Have they ever considered their extreme DIY project? “There were times when it was raining and muddy and we were organising the panels and I used to be attempting to get plumb to where the grid line ought to be,” admitted Mr. Gentry.
But they were determined to examine it out. “Because we went into this project with the mentality that we desired to do something extraordinary that will be a part of our history, we were really committed,” Ms Ramsey said.
Mr Gentry added: “We desired to rejoice the land and your grandparents.”
They moved into the home in October 2021. In December 2022, Mrs Ramsey gave birth to her son Romeo at home.
“We built this space together and little Rome was born here,” said Mr. Gentry. “It’s kind of wonderful.”
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