Though notoriously shallow and, well, useless, Puget Sound’s Useless Bay exerts a powerful force on Randy Wilcox. He leads a high-stress life in Hong Kong, but when he comes here, he collects beach rocks to make cabinet pulls. He walks over to visit his mom and dad, and he hangs out on the patio with neighbors. “Useless” seems like a pretty good thing.
Randy grew up on Whidbey Island and jumped at the opportunity to buy property near his parents. But within 72 hours of closing on a lot, Randy and his family had to board a plane to move overseas. Determined to get started on their vacation home right away, he and his wife, Sandy, found designers Eric Richmond and David Price, partners in Flat Rock Productions in nearby Langley. Eric and David remember the marathon planning session. “We got more excited the more we talked,” Eric says. “At the end,” David adds, “they said, ‘That’s great; let’s run with it.’ Then they left.”
Extraordinary distance didn’t pose a logistical problem for these homeowners or designers. Eric and David set up a page on their firm’s Web site for the Wilcoxes, with plans, drawings, photos, and other information they might need to make decisions. But for Randy, a type-A guy with a construction background, “it was killing me not to be there to help,” he says. His solution? To engage the designers, builder, and craftsmen in the project “as if it were theirs,” he says. “Once they were stoked about it, I could let go a little.”
At the first planning session, the bare bones of the two-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath house emerged. Eric and David’s design breaks the facade and living spaces into different shapes and ceiling heights. A shed roof tops the dining area, while the adjacent living room has a lower, wood-beam ceiling. Every room in the house admits light on at least two sides, which allows for better water views and gives balance to the design.
The resulting plan reflects two prominent features around the house: the bay to the rear and farmland in front. Red-cedar channel siding adds a barn reference, and the stucco, lighthouselike tower nods to the water. To create the feel of a casual waterfront building, the designers suggested aluminium-clad windows, a corrugated metal roof, and industrial exterior light fixtures. As the house took shape, Sandy and Randy followed the process on the Flat Rock Productions Web site and did a lot of Internet shopping. Sandy made some choices in person when the SARS virus sent her and the girls home from Hong Kong in 2003. Like the exterior, items chosen for the interiors reflect the bayside setting: wavy glass in the kitchen cabinets, a driftwood mantel, and a handcrafted fireplace screen designed to resemble kelp.
Despite the long-distance client/builder relationship, this home exceeded the couple’s expectations. Though Sandy and their three daughters spend only summers here, and Randy just a few weeks each year, they ease into the laid-back “useless” life pretty quickly. After settling for virtual reality during construction, their island reality today is virtually perfect.
Floor Plan
