Modern Seattle Lake House: A Video Game-Inspired Retreat | Lakeside Retreats

Most people that live here have no idea this exists. We might be, like, very close to Seattle, but it doesn't feel like that at all when we're out here. In Washington, especially in the Seattle area, there's mountains, there's water, there's forests. Seasons. There's a lake. We get all four seasons. We're here all year round. And you can completely lose yourself and forget that there's even a city around. We live here with my husband, Michael, and our daughter, and we'll be expecting our son here soon in a few weeks. The most common reaction is, like, I can't believe this is here, because it's fully transparent from some angles. All you see is the reflection in the windows of the trees, really, and sort of magically suspended up in the trees. It was designed that way, that we wanted the top floor to look like it was floating. Getting up here in the morning, like, never gets old. Yeah. Every single day is just beautiful. I'm Michael. And I'm Siobhan. And this is a home in Seattle, Washington. It's a four-bedroom, three-and-a-half bath, 4,000 square feet. It sits on a two-acre lot with about 150 feet of frontage to the lake. You were kayaking by. Yeah, I kayaked by, and the old owner had put a sign on the dock that said for sale. I didn't know. I thought it was just forest there. We later figured out there was a small cabin that's been here since the 40s, originally from Boy Scouts. And then it was a very large piece of land right on the lake that sits on the promontory coming into the lake, very private. Like, lakefront and privacy at the same time that usually doesn't go hand-in-hand. And quiet. And quiet, and those, like, it just seemed too good to be true. I make video games for work, particularly games that sort of foster creativity and that sort of thing. Like, for seven years, I worked on Minecraft, and we actually designed the house using the game. A video game is a great design medium because it's meant for visualization. A video game can turn a flat idea into 3D very quickly and very easily. So we built all that, played it until we were happy with it, and then we took it to an architect on the laptop, the first architect that didn't laugh us out of the room, and asked him to play it. Can you build this? Yeah. After a short four-year process, we moved into the house. Five, right? Maybe it was five years, I don't know. This house was probably our biggest idea and the wildest adventure. We drew a lot of our inspiration for the materials from Japanese and Scandinavian designs. Michael is from Denmark originally. The siding is a Japanese shishigibon treatment where they take cedar and flame it to create a natural sealant to it so it doesn't have to be treated with chemicals. The concrete is a board form treatment to get that really natural wood feel. It's a very cold material, but it still feels very warm because it has those wood features in it. These materials can be quite heavy. Metal and concrete can look really imposing, and the glass really lightens it up. So incorporating as much glass on the first floor as possible so that when you're inside, you really feel like you're living outside, and when you're outside, you can still see through to the lake. The first thing that you really see when you come into our home is the lake. We have almost a 180-degree view of the lake from our home, and we really wanted to incorporate as much of that view as possible. So we designed our living area to be a very open floor plan with as many windows as possible. Our house is the shape of a U, and we are really in the center of the U here. The center feature of the house is the steel wall that extends two stories tall. It's meant to really just provide a sense of scale in the house. Standing here in the living room, this really is the center of our home. It's where we do all of our daily living. All of our friends, our family, our playtime, Christmas happens here. Michael and I both grew up in homes that were completely heated in the winter with wood-burning fireplaces. So we found one that fits the house where it is glass and angular with a view through it. It doesn't impede a view. Everywhere we are in this home, there is a pocket where you can see a forest or there's a pocket where you can see the lake. Moving through the home to our kitchen, one of the most shocking things to me about building the house is not having upper cupboards. We don't have upper cabinets in our kitchen. Instead, we chose to have these huge windows where we can look out over the lake while we're in here cooking and in our daily living. We have a patio just out here where we often eat our meals in the summertime. We didn't want the view to be impeded from the front door through the kitchen windows and vice versa. So we found this fume hood that can raise and lower. The major focus of the house is the view, not the house necessarily itself. So a lot of our design choices are centered around minimalism to allow the outside to be the most important part of our home. We put these giant sliders in that can open completely up to one way or the other so we can choose if we want to be in our living room but still sitting outside or if we want to be in our kitchen and still experiencing the outside. So the primary bedroom is above us here, creating the shade for the outdoor living, which allowed us to also get heaters so we can extend our season to spring and fall. And from the kitchen, we have our dining area. Right here, we have our live-edge black walnut table that is on casters, actually. And again, with our indoor-outdoor living and wanting to maximize our short summers, we can move our table and eat outside. Most of the pendant lighting in our home is Danish. They're called globe lights. The really fun thing is, no matter what angle you're from, you can't see the light bulb in them. The light hanging in our stair volume is a vintage pH artichoke lamp from the 60s. It's an iconic lamp that we built that stairwell around specifically to incorporate that. Every time I see it, I always think about this house was built around the artichoke. That's what it feels like. It's the first light that gets turned on every day. I think there are always details in the house that you end up obsessing over, and for me, it was absolutely the stairs. I had seen these, like, really amazing-looking stairs in Japan that looked like they were just floating impossibly in thin air. So I think stairs are, I don't know, they're just seen as utilitarian, but they can be beautiful. They can be part of the architecture of the house. The stairs float. We really wanted it to be light while using these kind of heavy and destructible materials. When you walk upstairs, you're not walking up to an enclosed space. You're walking up to still an open space where you can see the forest out the back and still have the clear view of the lake in the front. We have our primary bedroom bathroom closet down this way, and over here we have our, what we call our kids' wing. We're expecting our son any day now, and so we have transitioned this room into his nursery. Flowing down the kids' wing, we have our daughter's room and the playroom. I call this room the treehouse. From this room, you have the illusion that you're floating above everything. It is extremely connected to nature up here. You really feel the lake from this room and this view. Our kids are going to grow up in the trees. It's amazing. We have the primary bedroom down this way. So now we're in the primary bedroom in what we consider the best corner of the house. We really do have like a 180-degree view of the lake. Similarly to the playroom, we have a floating feeling over the lake, so we really are just like hovering. As you'll see, we don't have any blinds. When we wake up, we want to see what's the world like outside. This table and chair set was designed to go together, and it's specifically meant so two people can sit cuddling on the couch and still have space for their knees but also still reach the table to have a drink. Our goldfish friend here came from a trip to Santa Fe where we walked into an art gallery, and it was just too fun not to bring home. We have a little hallway that leads back to our primary bathroom. We wanted to keep the privacy, so we chose not to limb trees up there, so it's more of a peek-a-view view of the lake. I actually really like being in here. It's a really nice place. A lot of floor-standing bathtubs are these oversized, gigantic things that are meant to be the focal point of a bathroom, and it took me forever to find one that I could actually sit in and not feel like I was slipping under, and I wanted something that kept me more upright so I could still see out over the lake, and this just happened to be the perfect one. I probably tested every bathtub in Seattle. I would encourage anyone to try to design their own house. It's a very rewarding process. Like, every part of it, you had to handle it. So it is, I would say, like a no-compromise house. This is exactly what we wanted to build, where we wanted to build it. It's a place to gather. It's a place to connect around. It feels like time left it alone a little bit. Getting up here in the morning, like, never gets old. Yeah, every single day is just beautiful. You know, this is, this is tranquil. This is quiet, this is peaceful. Coming here, people feel relaxed here, and that just creates space where connection can happen.