Home Book: Perfect-house quest leads to Fox Island

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Seattle @ Home

Saturday, October 21, 2006

Home Book: Perfect-house quest leads to Fox Island

The Perfect $100,000 House: A Trip Across America and Back in Pursuit of a Place to Call Home

COMING UP

KARRIE JACOBS

WHAT: The founding editor of Dwell magazine discusses her

new book

WHEN: 5 to 7 p.m. Sunday

WHERE: Design Within Reach,

1918 First Ave., Seattle

By Karrie Jacobs, Viking Press, $25.95

Yeah, riiiiight! In this market?

Turns out Karrie Jacobs' search for "The Perfect $100,000 House" is less about finding a perfect $100,000 house than it is about tracking this founding editor of Dwell magazine as she wanders cross-country in search of it.

She almost finds this unholy grail on Fox Island in Puget Sound. It is a black-and- white-sided construct known as "the Kennedy House" designed by Pioneer Square architects Mark and Peter Anderson.

To see a little of what Jacobs saw, check out their Web site at goto.seattlepi.com/r356.

Meanwhile, let's be as clear as the Andersons tried to be with Jacobs, short of calling her quest a pipe dream.

"We try to prepare people for the fact that it's not an easy number to achieve," Peter Anderson tells her. She goes on: "The upshot is that they will agree to do a $100,000 house only if 'there was an ambition for it to be an interesting piece of architecture,' " and that it not be a one-off but something that can be replicated.

Think prefab components and assembly-line construction.

Moreover, they tell her, it would not likely be a project they could make money on, and would likely require a thick application of elbow grease by any prospective owner.

Along that line, some of the material for the Kennedy House came from here and some of it from over there. The siding, for example, turns out to be castoff strips of roll-out asphalt roofing, some white, some black. Imagine seeing that arrive in your neighborhood.

And there is this: "... inventing the inexpensive strategies they used for the Fox Island project used up endless amounts of the architects' time," Jacobs says. She quotes Peter: "I'm sure we lost a considerable amount of money on this house."

By the time Jacobs bids Seattle farewell, however, she is "more convinced than ever that the Andersons are the right architects, the ones who should build my house. "The question," she concedes, "is whether I could get them to do it."

By then she has come to acknowledge the hard facts of today's home-building industry.

"The hard stuff -- the building foundations, bringing in utilities and getting approvals such as building permits -- is all more expensive and complicated than putting up walls.

"But so far," she says, "the existing prefab companies are mostly concerned with the walls. The only people who have streamlined the other processes -- the foundations, the plumbing systems, the legal and financial niceties -- are the big conventional home builders. The thing that the tract-house buildings have to offer is not good architecture or superior carpentry but a well-practiced proficiency at taking care of the hard stuff."

You need not go farther than that to get the picture.

But Jacobs does, and that is the joy of this book. Her recollections of a previous life as an undergraduate in the austere concrete buildings of The Evergreen State College -- the pre-fabricated concrete buildings, no less -- and in pre-Grunge Seattle, are worth the time spent between these covers, whether you discover that she finds her grail, or not.

-- Gordy Holt

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