Before you snort in disbelief, count your house as a piece of art and the odds change dramatically in my favor.
To carry my analogy further: The houses most people own in Anchorage are the equivalent of the generic prints you'll find bolted to the wall above the bed in a Motel 6:bland, unobjectionable and utterly undistinguished, with little if any relation to the real world outside and even less relation to anything most would call art.
"People are unique, but around here they end up living in spaces that are mostly the same," says Bruce Williams, principal at the Spenard architecture firm Black + White Studios. "We may be living in Alaska, but most of us are living in a suburb that could be anywhere else in the country."
There are numbers of homeowners and architects here, though, who believe that's not the way it has to be. These Alaskans are dedicated to the proposition that houses -- and the lives led within them -- can be artful, if only they can find the courage and capital to discover what that means.
SOUL OF THE HOUSE
Shaping our living environment is challenging. Doing more than just painting or patching the plaster is difficult because it asks us to exercise creativity in the way we live. Changing a house's structure fundamentally means being conscious in ways and at depths that are neither common nor comfortable.
If you sit down with an architect, he or she is likely to ask you to articulate your dreams, some of which may seem inarticulable. And once this arduous process is completed, you have to admit just how far short of those dreams are the spaces in which you've mostly conducted your life.
"Homes should reflect the people who live in them; your environment should reflect your life in a way that strengthens the family relationships that go on within it," Williams says. "When I start a project, I try to discover: What's the soul of the house?
"Oftentimes, though, with the speculative homes produced by the developers, there is no soul; it's just a copy made from another copy. The houses are mostly small and dark, with small windows. They're compartmentalized; they don't fit in with our lifestyle. If I can change that space, create a soul for it, connect the owners to the house in a way that's meaningful to them, then the opportunity to live in a more artful way comes forward."
LIVING IN SOUTH LIGHT
Living in an artful way is precisely what Laurie Wolf, a vice president at the Foraker Group, was after when she contracted with architect Mike Mense to make over the flat-roofed, 900-square-foot house between Fairview and the South Addition that she bought from her brother 11 years before. She had come back from a stint in grad school Outside with a husband, and the space that had nicely accommodated her and her dog before wasn't going to be sufficient any longer. Plus, it was a circa-1952 house with circa-1952 issues. It survived the '64 quake, all right, but it did not meet codes for being earthquake-proof. The wiring -- most of it the old cloth-wrapped variety -- was a fire waiting to happen. None of the plugs were grounded. The roof leaked perpetually in a particular spot where two roof slabs of different elevations met, leaving the gypsum board on the adjacent ceiling and walls permanently damp.
"It was the roof that finally convinced me to do the remodel," Wolf says. "It seemed like every winter I was paying out money to fix the roof, and I just couldn't face doing it one more time."
At first, Wolf just wanted to bring the house up to snuff, sell it and use her equity to buy elsewhere. But a look around at what was available elsewhere convinced her she was in the right place already. "I just don't understand how people can buy the sorts of places they're buying now," she says. "They'll pay more or the same as what I paid to renovate, all to live in a house with no view, no yard, no trees, no light, no privacy -- none of what we've got right here in town. So when I started to think about where I would buy after that, I decided I wouldn't be able to get what I have here. The really obvious reason for staying is that there was just this fabulous view to be had."
The view is spectacular -- from the top of its rise, the property has an almost unobstructed line of sight to the southeast, all the way to the Chugach. From where the house was squatting, though, the view was mostly wasted. The question became how to make use of the location. Though the relatively large lot could easily have accommodated a house with a bigger footprint, the solution was to go up, not out, and -- Wolf's main requirement -- to deliver light into the house's darkness. The plans eventually delivered by Mense promised plenty of that. "I knew we couldn't pull the views into the living room in her old place," Mense says. "So we re-oriented the second story of the house to face the mountains, and we made her new bedroom so cool that she could actually live up there, looking out at the view and living in the south light. In the south half of the house, we also warped the roof up to the southeast, and in the north half we warped the roof up to the southwest, so the evening light and the south light could get into the rooms and even -- to a limited extent -- down the stairwell to the living room."
The new upper story roughly doubled the house's square-footage. Its walls are tumbling planes of glass and stucco that seem to lean out in compound angles that come together at the roof line, as if Mense were using them to thumb his nose at the now-vanished flat roof. Mense also used furniture-grade plywood to create a custom wall storage unit and a window seat tucked into a southeast-facing angle that juts toward the mountains like the prow of a ship. In addition to the bedroom, there is a walk-in closet sufficient to accommodate both Laurie and her husband, Dan Heath.
A new guest room and craft room are separated by a scrim of finished plywood hidden on each side by high bookshelves. If the couple's priorities for the spaces ever change, the wall can easily be taken down to make the two rooms into a single room.
"Sure, it gets dark in Alaska during the winter," Wolf says. "But you can get a lot of light in winter into your house if you just plan it right. At any point during the day, there's natural light just flying into this place. We can even lay in bed and watch the northern lights."
FUNCTION IS THE FIRST THING
Light and a view were also strong persuaders for Mayor Mark Begich and his wife, Deborah Bonito, when they set about transforming the split-level they bought in 1995, which backs onto Cheney Lake. Equally important, though, was making the house support their active public life.
When they moved into it, the house was a perfectly ordinary example of its type, with the problems typical to most pattern-book houses. The first problem -- the lack of an arctic entrance -- they addressed almost immediately, bumping the entryway out a dozen feet or so and protecting the living room from drafts with a partial wall of glass block. It was good, but it wasn't nearly enough.
"There's an eagle out there on the lake, and loons and moose and lots of other water critters," Bonito says. "And we had one set of glass doors that opened onto it for the view and the light. The kitchen was just too boxed in to let us entertain the way we wanted to. Then there was this awful carpet in the living room, and the master bedroom had this tiny bathroom off it."
These were the basic problems the couple brought to Mark Ivy, principal with Mark Ivy and Associates. Ivy began looking for a solution by doing what he always does with clients: He started asking questions about what happened when they got home from work.
"With every project, I ask: 'What's the progress of events from the time you come through the door to when you go to bed?' Ivy says.
The devil is in the details, and so is the renovation: Ivy's interrogatory leads eventually past superficial concerns and ends up at the heart of the owners' priorities. Different clients lead different lives, and different lives function according to their own clocks, their own imperatives and patterns.
"People look at the projects I've done and they ask me why they look entirely different," Ivy says. "And I say, 'Well, it's because they were for different clients.' "
When it comes time to begin to draw up the plans, Ivy says, function is the first thing he thinks about.
"At the end of any project, what you want to have is a house that functions significantly better than it did when you started. I don't try to show clients what (a renovation will) look like; I show them how it will work."
When he did this for Begich and bonito, they immediately saw the house's possibilities were greater than they had considered. Additions to the list of changes they wanted Ivy to work in began to multiply. "At some point, with all the things we were proposing doing to the house, Mark (Ivy) just shrugged and said, 'So are you really going to do all this?' " Bonito recalls. "So Mark (Begich) looked at me and asked, 'Are we going to live here for the next 20 to 30 years?' And when I said yes, that's when we made the decision to just go for it." "Going for it" meant that the mayor, who had just lost his first bid for the city's top job, had a new role as the project's general contractor. He and Bonito moved into two 10-by-10-foot rooms on the lower floor while the roof and walls were pulled down or jacked up around them. Bonito laughs ruefully.
"What you hear happens when people do this kind of thing is that they get divorced," she says. "Well, we got Jake (their toddler son)."
Ivy engineered a floor plan in which formerly crowded spaces open up and out. A new roof line and new windows in the back pull the view of Cheney Lake across a new deck and practically into the lap of someone sitting at the kitchen counter now standing where a wall used to be. South-facing clerestory windows pull the light down into the space to warm the natural stone tiles and the rich palette of saturated colors Bonito chose from a cocktail napkin she picked up at Metro Music and Book. The new square-footage at the back of the house allowed the couple to add not only the dining area but also a larger bath and a walk-in closet in the master bedroom.
Perhaps the biggest benefit, however, is one that's least immediately evident. A space that's warm and intimate for a small family can also accommodate the large parties the mayor periodically throws for supporters and staff.
"We've had up to a hundred people in here," Bonito says. "It was tight, but it wasn't uncomfortable."
HOUSE AS METAPHOR
Sometimes making a house function better isn't merely a matter of improving traffic flow or introducing better access to a pretty view, though. It can also be about making the space over into a breathing metaphor for its owners' values.
"A home should ultimately be an expression of the people living in it," says Black + White's Williams. "If more of us were doing that -- designing buildings that really belong here and really belong to the people living in them, that would change things here dramatically."
Dramatic change -- designing spaces that fit lives and not preconceived notions of how we are supposed to live -- is a subject of urgent interest to Williams and to a client, Jeff Stoeckle, who is preparing to make over a house in Palmer according to plans Williams has drawn up. What makes Stoeckle's relationship with Williams unique is that Stoeckle is himself an architect who used to work with Williams at the downtown firm Koonce Pfeffer Bettis Inc. and that he started out by hating Williams' work.
"I've worked with Bruce for like nine years," says Stoeckle, who now works for Architects Alaska. "When I first worked with him, I didn't like him at all. I thought he was cocky and that his approach to design was not responsive to the normal design culture."
"Normal design culture" was clearly not what Williams was interested in. To his way of thinking, that was part of what was creating problems, and changing the thinking of those creating these unsatisfactory spaces was going to be tough.
"Whenever you want to make that step forward and change the established order, you always get resistance before you get acceptance," Williams says. "And oftentimes, that acceptance doesn't come until after the project has been successfully completed."
Over time, Stoeckle came to respect Williams' ideas. Meanwhile, he and his wife, Jan, bought a house in the Valley with the idea that they'd change it when they were ready.
"I wanted to be this guy who had the very different house everybody talked about and said, 'Hey, there's this house out in the Valley ... have you seen that place?' " Stoeckle says.
But after he had created, then rejected, five sets of his own plans for the makeover, he decided the vision he needed was not going to come out of his own head.
Williams and the Stoeckles began cautiously to exchange ideas, moving gradually from a discussion of the physical to what can only be called metaphysical. It wasn't until the couple swallowed hard and mentioned the importance of their religious faith that the lights really went on.
"We had been talking about who we are, how we lived, what was unique about us and so forth," Stoeckle says. "And that in itself was almost a spiritual experience. But then, after a while -- and we almost didn't do it -- we started telling him about a prophecy we'd gotten once about our home being a halfway house between the unsafe world and the church. And when we told him that, that's when his eyes got real big and he said, 'That's it. That's what I needed to know.' "
The result is a plan that is as radical in design as it is subtle in representing the Stoekles' lives.
"His design refers to the things we talked about -- like a surround for the front door made from this red glass. Basically, it represents the blood smeared on the door post, so when the angel of death came on Passover, it wouldn't take those people.
"I thought that was really out there. I didn't want to walk through my house and have Scripture written all over the wall, but here he's working in the metaphor in a subtle way. He said: 'It won't be obvious to anyone else who comes to the house, but you're going to know these pieces of your life are there.' He was making the living space into a statement of what we believe."
THERE MUST BE A REASON
Plenty of disasters -- aesthetic and structural -- have happened when Alaskans have launched themselves into the business of making a statement with their homes without professional consultation. After all, the blue tarp did not become an icon of Alaska domestic life for no reason.
However, there are those with sufficient skills, vision and -- perhaps most important -- help to make magic happen themselves.
Anne Raup, a photo editor at the Daily News, and her husband, Mark Wedekind, a maker of high-end custom furniture, began in 2001 to transform the Airport Heights home they bought seven years before. The house was small, oppressively dark and lacked the storage Wedekind needed for the lumber that is his stock in trade. Like Laurie Wolf, they considered selling it and buying elsewhere, but multiple factors legislated for their staying put.
"We looked up on the Hillside," Wedekind says, "and the houses there that were within our reach often just had no yards, and there was just so much junk up there, and we thought: In Airport Heights, we're a mile from Anne's job, we're right on the greenbelt and we have a lot of good neighbors; why would we leave?"
As they set out to plan the project, to supplement their own vision they used ideas expressed by architect Sarah Susanka in her books "The Not So Big House" and "Creating the Not So Big House." They read "A Pattern Language," the book-manifesto from the architects at the Center for Environmental Structure, from which Susanka herself drew inspiration.
Like Wolf, they decided to put a second story on their existing structure, creating a wall of windows in the southern exposure to let in the light and using half-walls to define a bathroom and bedroom in the vaulting space beneath the new, steeply pitched roof. All during the process, the couple relied on the talents of close friends, neighbors and acquaintances to help them do demolition, set up the new frame, hang drywall. They were guided by a sign they tacked up when the addition was newly framed: "There Must Be a Reason."
"We were both committed to not just putting a new box on top of another box," Raup says. "And since we were doing it ourselves, if we thought of something that was cool, we didn't have to consult anybody; we could just do it. And we did that a lot. ... We were getting ready to put the ceiling in the bedroom and we looked at the dormer in there and thought: Why are we going to cover all these cool angles? So we didn't.
"It was just really important to both of us -- and it got a little out of hand -- that we build something that reflected our personality," Raup adds.
Perhaps the most significant nod in this direction is the stairway from the balcony down to the door just inside the arctic entry. Wedekind, who often incorporates granite river rock into his furniture, wanted to use this gesture in a very personal way in the house's design. The stairway was his chance to do it. He shaped treads and balusters from a reddish plantation-grown wood called Lyptus, and for the balustrade he hand-shaped eight laminated strips of walnut into a sweeping curve that softens and defines the volume of the house's interior as the balustrade descends to the newel post. There, it cradles a group of rounded rocks like an abstract hand, giving the intensely personal statement of the post's complex construction a central role in expressing the house's personality. The staircase was a tough project, and to make it happen Raup and Wedekind had to draw on the talents and assistance of numerous friends and neighbors, who helped glue and clamp pieces together. By the time it was finished, it was as much an expression of community and the couple's relationships as it was an expression of private artistic vision.
"If the house can be said to have a soul-center, I think the staircase is it," Raup says. "I think it's the grounding point for the expression of what the house is and who we are."
While the stairway stands as the most visible embodiment of the notion that beauty can emerge from community, the couple stress that there isn't a square inch of the house that hasn't felt multiple hands.
Indeed, it is because of the flow of relationship -- of help asked for and help offered, meals made at critical moments and friendships serendipitously formed -- that the house's transformation stayed afloat. Though it wasn't something they could have foreseen, the project ultimately became a binding force in the couple's process of finding a sense of belonging in their house, on their street, in the midst of their circle.
"It's ultimately why we didn't leave," Raup says. "It's why we're here."
Daily News arts editor Mark Baechtel can be reached at 257-4323 or mbaechtel@adn.com.
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