Fine Line Of Design Winning Architect Meshes Home With Surroundings
With more than 100 acres of wooded hillside to play with, architect Charles Anderson could easily have perched his parents’ vacation home on one of several precipices overlooking Lake Pend Oreille.
Instead, he chose a sheltered spot at the base of a rock outcropping. “You still get a view,” he explains, “plus you’re able to walk to the more dramatic spots and enjoy them. If we’d put it way out on the edge, the house would have been dramatic, but the site would have been buried.”
That sensitivity to placement, as well as Anderson’s conscientious use of indigenous materials earned the 38-year-old Seattle architect top honors in The Spokesman-Review’s 1995 Inland Northwest Home Awards contest.
“This is a great example of how you make a view home feel like part of its setting, not just an observer of its setting,” commented Seattle Times architecture writer Fred Albert, one of five jurors.
The three-bedroom home is not large - only 2,500 square feet, including a separate two-bedroom guest cottage behind the main structure. But it feels spacious, thanks to courtyards just beyond the living room’s retractable glass walls.
Anderson’s favorite space is outside the home in the back courtyard, looking through the structure toward Lake Pend Oreille. “The way I thought about it,” he says, “the most important rooms were the outdoor rooms, and the central space in the middle is part of that.”
The home’s simple floor plan reflects the lifestyle of the architect’s parents, Ted and Judy Anderson of Spokane. “The house encourages people to come together rather than everyone going off somewhere to work on a computer in one room, watch TV in another room and cook in another,” their son says.
Anderson applauds the craftsmanship and cooperation of chief woodworker Chuck Stiles and other Sandpoint artisans, whose peeled cedar posts and rugged stonework interplay with elegant finish carpentry.
While acknowledging that the square-foot cost of this home is well beyond most clients’ means, Anderson says, “You could do this same basic house in different materials for an extremely low budget, and I think it would still be a great house.
“But in order for clients to feel that way, they have to separate themselves from all the Streets of Dreams and home shows that shower us with options and materials and all the things that seem to represent what we need to have.
“They’d have to move beyond worrying about what other people would think about a house made of concrete blocks and plywood. And that’s an extremely difficult hump to get over.”
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo Graphic: Floor plan of house