Inside the Cottrell House: An Oregon Mid-Century Modern by John Yeon | House Tour

This house did mold me. This house inspired me. Its beauty and its peace really inculcated all of us. It really helped formulate my values of what was important. Family and nature being really important and how do you preserve beauty? How do you share it with others? This house was very welcoming. I'm Marcy Cottrell Houle and we are today at the Cottrell House where I grew up in Portland, Oregon. The architect was John Yon. It was built between 1949 and 1951. My dad was a doctor and he always wanted to build a home. He also loved nature and he loved photography. Somehow he found out about John Yon and they met. John Yon knew this site because he had built, his first home was the Watzick House across the street. This was his last home that he built. My dad and he shared similar values of the, I think, the importance of nature, the idea of bringing the outside in to the house. Also he, John Yon, was wonderfully, would listen to the interests because my father being an amateur filmmaker designed a film room and projector screen. John Yon made a great impact. He really brought, along with Belushi stores and some other architects, the mid-century modern to Portland. But I think what else was really significant about John Yon was that he, his love of nature. He preserved Ecola State Park. He was also responsible for helping preserve the whole Columbia River Gorge natural scenic area. And so nature was very important. Asian influence, beauty, but nature. And I think sometimes we forget about that, but that's a really important part of his architecture and his impact on us. I think they worked closely together. And I remember the story of where we're sitting here now and the den was almost over their budget. And then my dad became the general contractor and we had all the subcontractors he worked with that he highly regarded. So he regarded everyone well. And so he made movies of John Yon and they worked very closely together. Almost 13 acres of old growth trees. So it's a very special site. And they donated that to this whole idea of preserving the beauty of the house, learning about mid-century modern, but also how nature incorporates who we are. My dad loved the house, but he also loved Oregon and he loved thinking about future generations. So they're very altruistic. We were raised that way. And he always thought this house would be a wonderful place for education, to bring people in, to learn. So when we set it up and donated it to the University of Oregon, the university has a clause in there. We have a moral agreement to make this happen. That's always been important that it's a showcase, yes, of mid-century modern, but we want it to be more. We want it to educate and illuminate and make people realize what's special about Oregon, what's special about John Yon. That was his goal. Growing up here really impacted my life because we had family values that were very close, but this house and the connection with the outdoors really impacted all of us, especially me, to becoming a wildlife biologist and a writer. As they get older, they had a little more time. So I got the time with my parents. I could really talk to them. We have a wonderful dining room table where everything, we couldn't watch TV during dinnertime ever, but we had to sit at the dining room table and discuss, but everything was okay. You could discuss anything and kind of learn that inclusivity of your thoughts and ideas, and nothing was wrong, but they had you think. It was designed, the house, to look out the living room window and see Mt. Hood. And now, of course, the trees have all grown up. You can't see Mt. Hood anymore, but it was much more when I was growing up. My bedroom was in another part of the house. I could look out and I could see the moon. I could see rabbits. I could see animals and birds. It's totally grown up after, how many, 50-some years, 60 years. It's more shady. It's darker, but it's still beautiful trees. My name is Marcus Bennett. I'm a superintendent with Shomer and Sons. We started working on the Cattrall House five years ago, basically a revamp of the whole house. We put a brand new roof on it. It had a cedar-shaped roof, like two and a half inches thick, but they switched out for a composite roof because it's more practical and maintaining. We gave the whole house a paint job, and we actually have an Australian painter. He's pretty good. It's hard to find a good painter. There were certain parts of the house that were, like, there was a wall over under the flat roof that was completely disintegrated, and we didn't even know. I can't remember how we found it. I think it was through one of the downspouts. We had to make sure all of those were switched out when we did the roof. We actually had scaffolding up on the complete exterior of the house going to the roof to make it safer and easier to work on. Last year, we put a new floor in the kitchen. This house has flooded three times, actually, because of some of it because of weather, the other because it has radiant heating, and in the winter this last year, the copper pipes burst, so we ended up putting an antifreeze system in to keep the water from freezing in the pipes and the radiant heating. I think one of John Young's design features is tight lines, and when you get a tight line and material in between it and they're too tight, there's not enough room for air or water wicking into the moisture or into the material, so we try to have the best of both worlds and try to close it up but still give it enough room to breathe and to be practical for weather issues. Exterior paint is all original color. Some of it was matched. There was actually some coating of colors here, so that made it kind of nice. That was a big job in itself, the painting of the exterior. It's always a problem-solving situation. You start something you think you're good, which I've learned to anticipate. I think I got a pretty good handle on that just because I'm aware of all the issues that come along with working on these houses. One thing I love about this house, too, is that you can't see it all from one observation point. You don't really see the size, the whole extent of it. You have to discover it. Coming up the driveway, all of a sudden you see a series of steps and a backyard and trees and the forest, and then you go up the steps and you open the door and then the magic happens. When you walk in that front door, there's something that happens with this house. I've seen this over and over, people saying it, and it certainly was for me. The walls are welcoming. You walk in, there's magic, and it's the beauty. There's warmth. There's calmness. There's just an embracing of these walls that really have love inside them. We used to have our piano. My grandmother's rug is still there. They designed the living room around this rug. And the couch, I used to love sitting there when I was little because my sister was a piano major. The piano would be the one end, and I would just sit there and listen to her, because I was so much younger, listen to her play her pieces. That was really fun. And the couch was also where we would sit when my dad would show his movies, so it was very a social family place. And the dining room was where a lot happened because we had a big dining room table. We always had dinner on the table and have discussions and talk about what we wanted to do with our lives or what was bothering us or what we didn't want to do with our lives. It didn't matter. Everything was safe to talk about. I think there's a sense of safety in this house too. And then as we left the dining room, you would go into the kitchen. John Yon designed the kitchen table. He designed the chairs, and he designed something that we loved, but it was a moving table. And so you could move from the food and take it to the dining room, but we didn't use it just for that. We would sit on it. We'd climb underneath it. You'd push it around. That was life, was that kitchen. And so then, back to the dining room, then come into here where we're sitting in the den. This was where the family would gather a lot afterwards. We just, it was always warm because the floors have that radiant heating. There's just something about walking in here, and it was warm, and so you'd want to sit in here and sit on this couch and be together. And so then, if you go back down to the living room, part of the house was where my bedroom was, and my sister's bedroom. And my sister, other sister, lived upstairs. And so those were the kids' rooms. Then we had the attic. You see the steep steps going up in the den, which always, I'm worried my mom's always going to fall down. No one's ever fallen down, but they are steep. And so my dad did a lot of his film making upstairs, or splicing of films and all that, and they had books. And then you have the major part of the room. My dad would, gosh, I remember when he brought in a local artist to live with us. He always was bringing in interesting things to do painting, and so that room became kind of an art place. Of course, we loved the basement. That was the room where everything happened too, where we had ping pong, and we had, my dad had so many decorations from around of, he was a scuba diver, so there were shells and this and that all around. So that was a fun place to be. And then his workroom. He loved building things, and so there was that. So the house has just a lot of different rooms, but each one had a role and a purpose. It was a lot of fun. I remember sitting down on the driveway trying to decide when I was in fourth grade, do I want to be a biologist or an author? Well, I ended up being both. But just having this nature around me, and the whole idea of John bringing the natural world inside. It was a continuous flow, inside, outside, and I think that's what I'm still searching for wherever I go. What you're doing is you're showcasing something that I think is really valuable that people don't have anymore in terms of what they feel for homes or growing up. Maybe their values are just a little different than the idea of a welcoming, sharing place that brings happiness. So this house brought happiness. It really did. Once you know and have felt it, and grown up here with this, you want to share that. I was this kid that came late in life, and my parents wasn't really supposed to be here, and I had the joy of being raised with wonderful parents, wonderful family, and a house that I absolutely love. This house is alive. I always give it a kiss when I leave. My dad stayed here, my mom stayed here until she died, and they didn't want to leave, which is, you know, and you can see why. So we made it possible for them to stay here, and then U of O took it over, and the rest is history. I'm very grateful to the University of Oregon for taking on the John Young Center, and having the vision to preserve this house, the Watsik House, and the Shire, and then the wonderful people we've worked with, Casey Culver, Marcus. They feel that spirit of the house, too, and so everyone who's worked on this house, something happens to them. Something touches you.