Contrarians Pour On the Concrete
A highly modern Mercer Island home ruffles feathers; a house of glass and rusted steel.
Avid fliers who love cars, airplanes, hangars and barns, Shawn and Sherrie Parry are no shrinking violets. "We're both the kind of kids who were described as bulls in a china shop," said Mrs. Parry.
The culmination of their interests, vision and nonconformity is a house that doesn't look anything like the others in this quiet, lakeside neighborhood-or like most other houses, for that matter. Amid tightly spaced Nantucket-style cottages and 1950s ranches sits an 8,000-square-foot conglomeration of concrete, rusted steel and glass geometric shapes.
A heavy steel door painted glossy wasabi green swings open to reveal a 75-foot-long bridge suspended 10 feet off the lawn below, creating an inner courtyard. Along one side a few feet away is a wing resembling a railroad car, with rusty burnt orange steel and gray concrete siding. The bridge ends in a door, which opens to another narrow steel bridge, almost a catwalk, overlooking the main room below. That room is mostly bare concrete walls, concrete floors and walls of steel columns and glass windows that look out over a back yard and Lake Washington beyond. Along the ceilings runs exposed pipe that pumps in geothermal heat.
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The furniture is sufficiently sparse that the couple's two daughters, 10 and 14, have been allowed to hit tennis balls against the wall in the front hallway and ride scooters along the floors (the scooter has since been banned). An enormous concrete fireplace rises from the floor up to the 24-foot ceiling. Bright red and yellow paintings on wood and canvas break up the one vast white wall.
"It's not for everyone. But it's perfect for us," said Mr. Parry, age 51. A commercial real-estate developer who acted as general contractor, Mr. Parry loves that the house has a view of Renton Municipal Airport, where he and his wife met when she gave him flying lessons. It also has views of Mt. Rainer and the Boeing factory where the couple can see the new 737s emerge.
Posted on design blog contemporist.com, the home attracted praise but also comments like it had "all the warmth of an oil refinery." When the Parrys left a dinner party early one night, noting they had to get up early to meet the concrete truck in the morning, a woman exclaimed "You're pouring more concrete?" Some acquaintances loved it; others asked when the home would be finished long after it was complete.
Some neighbors expressed unhappiness, particularly when 40-ton cranes started erecting 30-foot concrete walls and big pump concrete trucks showed up at 5 a.m. (one neighbor phoned the police, citing a disturbance of the peace).
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The couple takes the criticism in stride. "We wanted our house to be strong and a piece of art in itself," Mr. Parry said.
The project's high-profile architect-Tom Kundig of Seattle firm Olson Kundig, known for his steel, concrete and glass homes that expose the guts of their construction-says he's used to what he calls insulting remarks. "This kind of design is scary to some people. It's different. But I still get offended. It's like someone saying you are ugly," he says.
Living in a more traditional house in the suburb of Bellevue, the Parrys purchased the Mercer Island lot for $750,000 in 2001 and tore down its tri-level ranch-style house in 2006. They said they knew exactly the style of house they wanted to build in its place, and mapped out their vision, using words like "strong" and "drama" and taking it to several architects before they worked up the courage to ask for a meeting with Mr. Kundig, whom they considered a rock star out of their league.
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The house took a year and cost a little over $200 per square foot to build, considerably less time and money than average because of the Parrys' experience, contacts, participation and skills. Mrs. Parry, 47, acted as the project manager, carrying 60-pound bags of concrete up a 30-foot ladder and overseeing the work from sunrise to sunset. During construction, the family lived in a 500-square-foot beach hut owned by the beach club next door; at one point the hut ran out of power for 10 days. (A shingled, four-bedroom, 3,500-square-foot house down the street with a lake view is for sale for $3 million.)
The beach-club parking lot has a clear view into the Parrys' master bedroom-something that doesn't bother them. Friends often wave to them from below. "In this day of mass-produced cookie cutter houses, they have a unique style," says neighbor and friend Susie Cero, an orthopedic surgeon. "They like things straightforward. What you see is what you get."
Click here for more on the concrete house
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