Mileposts and Milestones

Stuck in your car at the railroad crossing on the Elliott Avenue waterfront, a long noisy train stacked with shipping containers might be just an inconvenience. You'll be home soon enough, right? But what if the roaring freight trains, passing two dozen times a day, are right in your front yard? "We love the trains," says the owner of a striking new home perched above the tracks in Seattle's North Beach neighborhood. Designed by Seattle architect Eric Cobb, the place reflects both his modernist sensibilities and those of his married clients, who prefer to remain unnamed.

Above the tracks is a panoramic Northwestern view from the sailboats at Shilshole to the cargo vessels steaming down Puget Sound. You can see the attraction, but also the trains—there's no ignoring this stretch of track running north along the shoreline beyond Golden Gardens. Quiet and bucolic it's not. The house is even known as "Mile Post 9," named for a marker down by the tracks. Yet the juxtaposition of the gritty railroad setting and a spectacular view appealed to the owners, who'd purchased a tear-down "Uncle Ole beach house" on the property in the mid-1990s. They commenced building a replacement with Cobb in 2003, completing the residence last summer. It subsequently earned a merit award from the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

Cobb's firm, E. Cobb Architects, is known for a progressive aesthetic—without being dogmatic about it. The owner started out on that same page: "We like modern stuff. I like clean edges, simplicity. The house in North by Northwest has always had a big influence on me." At the same time, this had to be a practical and durable modernism—not delicate and white. "The exterior had to be utterly maintenance free [with] as little wood as possible." Being a contractor himself, and supervising the job morning and evening, the client and Cobb settled on sturdy, functional materials—aluminum and galvanized metal, plus lots of Hardy-board, a product like the cement-board commonly used on apartment buildings. Rather than fighting the elements, the expectation is for these humble materials to be "enhanced with use and over time," gaining a weathered patina with the seasons, the owner explains.

Architect Eric Cobb (Chris Eden)

COBB SAYS he's "done a lot of evangelizing" about modernist design while building his 11-year-old practice. His values are "simple and straightforward and not fussy . . . no nonsense, go for the space [with] not a lot of exotic materials." Fortunately, there was no need for such sermons with these clients. Rather, there was the challenge of designing for "the extreme conditions" of the sloped site so that the result wasn't just a stack of boxes in a top-down pile. A brutal, inelegant solution would've been to build a massive concrete retaining wall near the street, then bunker the house up to it, each of the three floors set squarely on top of the next. Instead, the slope is preserved by thrusting the house more toward the water (incorporating the original foundation), with the gap spanned by an entryway bridge. Then the house's mass is further reduced—to the eye—by shifting the stack with overhangs and projections, almost like three distinct structures (or four, counting the detached street-level garage).

Cobb's focus also had to be on how the clients live, building on the modernist imperatives of "space and light" in the central living-dining-kitchen area, while achieving some separation and privacy in other spheres. Connecting the three main levels is a central open stairwell, which also serves as a dramatic light shaft. At one landing, what might appear to be closet doors lead to private little rooms for the computer and TV areas. Looking down from the entrance level, one stands on a floor that's partly a window; rather than the easy, obvious choice of opening the front door directly to a water view, the glass floor invites your eye down the stairwell and to the living area. This was a change added by the client, and Cobb approved: "Design doesn't end where construction begins."

The house stands in opposition to what Cobb terms the "cold" stereotype of modernism that has perhaps limited its prior acceptance in the Northwest. (Somehow the midcentury modernism of Paul Thiry and Roland Terry stalled at about the same time.) Yet the modernist idiom itself is inherently neutral, he emphasizes. Choice of materials, like this home's bright maple floors and red-green-silver exterior palette, makes the place emphatically warm. Light, he notes of our cloudy climate, always ought to be a paramount concern.

That's certainly true of the owner, who doesn't intend to hang any sunshades on the predominantly glass Sound-view side of the house. "We didn't try to fight the UV," he says. "We wanted as much light as possible. [We live] kind of a Mediterranean lifestyle. We eat outdoors as much as possible." This is made easier with 2,000 square feet of decking, adding to the home's 3,500 square feet of interior space. If dinner guests get the evening sun in their eyes, there's a bowl of cheap drugstore sunglasses to borrow. For that reason, "We don't have any art," his wife laughs. What she means is that framed posters aren't meant to last forever before becoming sun-bleached, and they have the same view toward their rugs and furniture. The value lies in the volume and light, not the furnishings.

Befitting the owner's desire for clean lines, a rooftop patio remains uncluttered. (Chris Eden)