Photo by Tim LaBarge
If you’re walking along the east edge of Mt. Tabor Park, as I was last weekend, you can see the house Webster Wilson designed and occupies nestled into the hillside just beyond the park’s picnic tables. And it's worth keeping an eye out for.
The house, which was included in last year’s 11 x Design homes tour, is built on four levels, the bottom level reserved for an additional apartment that Wilson’s family rents out. One enters at the second level into the kitchen and dining area. At 2,600 square feet, it includes four bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms in addition to a 550-square-foot accessory dwelling unit studio apartment below. The main house’s master bedroom, on the fourth floor, includes a 400 square foot top deck.
The house has radiant heat throughout with stainless steel countertops in the kitchen. The main floor and bathroom floor/walls clad in domestic Vermont sea-green slate. Bathroom countertops are black Eastern Canadian granite. The upper floors and all cabinetry are certified German beech, and FSC-certified mahagony was used on the decks, which add another 200 square feet of space.
Looking east from Mt. Tabor, the house enjoys views of Mt Hood, Mt St Helens and the eastern cityscape, which drove the design. But the house is also a work of simple but intricate geometry and highly detailed finishes. I particularly liked the house’s two-story vertical window wall for capturing the view, as well as the design’s floating wood loft and stair. Also a big part of the exterior look of the project, at least on its back side with the east-looking view, is a wood and metal stairway attached to the building and giving it extra structural support.
Photo by Brian Libby
Photo by Tim LaBarge
Photo by Brian Libby
"It just seemed perfect,” Webster said of the vacant lot he and wife Maya Foty found on the edge of Mt. Tabor. “Our prerequisite was we were looking for a lot with a view and light and air. There are limited areas in Portland that have that, in a family friendly neighborhood. We also liked the idea of doing an infill project. It was limiting but also liberating to do a small lot. I think a lot of developers had looked at this lot and said, ‘I can’t do a huge duplex here.’”
Although it’s the first house in Portland to be designed by Wilson it is not his first overall. Wilson has also designed striking houses in Hawaii and Vermont. One of his first projects, a sauna, received a Wood Design Award in 2004 and was published in Dwell, Sunset and Fine Homebuilding magazines.
Wilson earned a master’s of architecture degree at the University of Washington and, during those years, interned under renowned Seattle architect James Cutler. “I guess my formative experience was working for Cutler,” he says, “because of all the wood construction and high level of design. It had a little bit of an old world philosophy. The emphasis was on hand drawn details.” Webster also spent a summer interning in Paris for architect Gerard Grandval and, before moving to Portland, previously worked in New York City for Lee Skolnik, a noted museum and exhibit designer.
Photo by Chad Kirkpatrick
Photo by Bob Zaikoski
Although Wilson works for himself, this wasn’t exactly a sole practitioner’s design. Wilson’s wife Maya is also an architect, specializing in historic preservation. “She was there all along,” Wilson says of her influence on the house. “I kind of generated ideas, but she was definitely a driving force. I think she made it more humanistic too. I was focusing on the tectonics and the detail side of it, and she was focusing on keeping it family friendly and being responsive to the neighborhood and the city.”
Wilson also has an ace up his sleeve when it comes to his house’s artwork. His father is artist Mark Wilson, a pioneer of computer art whose work was recently part of a retrospective devoted to the genre at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. “On the 11 x Design tour, we got about as many questions about the art as we did the house,” the architect laughs. But certainly there are no hard feelings about the extra attention, of course: Web had his father design a special artwork that was laser-cut into the house’s front door.
Photo by Bob Zaikoski
Photo by Chad Kirkpatrick
Initially Wilson had the house on the market, but he and the family (including two young daughters) ultimately decided to occupy the home themselves. After all, if you're the architect of this project, it makes a pretty good calling card. And indeed, I would place Wilson firmly in the group of talented up-and-coming firms that participated in the 11 x Design tour last year, a small fraternity of home designers that could, as with generations past in Portland, come to have a much bigger imprint on the city's architecture in the coming decade(s).
I've walked along that street enjoying how the front facade of this house seems to float elegantly in space against the backdrop of the Mt. Hood view. It presents one of those simple but beautiful compositions that the best of Modernist architecture has given us over and over again for almost a century now. However, it makes me a little sad. This simple beauty, to me has always been coupled with another of the original promises of modernism...that it would be possible for the great majority of people to live this way. Not with a spectacular view, German beech, and Canadian granite...but with some of that sense of light, space, and formal beauty. Don't get me wrong. I don't have a particular beef with listing a well built house on Mt Tabor with that kind of view for 800K. I'm glad that Brian showcased some of its beauty and wrote up its architect(s) in the context of local dwelling talent. I certainly don't have any conclusive answers for why this particluar modernist dream faltered (at least in the US). However, I guess I'm pink enough to still long for the more "social democratic" and affordable aspect of modernism and hope that it has a place in Portland's domestic architecture in the coming decade.
Posted by: Will | March 09, 2010 at 04:35 PM