- [Dan] One of the great things about this site
is that the tides change your scenery in an extreme way.
You know, when the tide is out,
you feel like the house is perched over a beach
that you can kind of go and wander.
And when the tide is in, the house feels as if it is
almost like a boat sort of hovered right above the water.
(gentle regal music)
- All right, come on, let's have a look.
This is my living room.
- Kristi had a lot of great ideas coming into the design.
She has an excellent design sensibility.
- And this is what it's about.
Being on the water, seeing it, feeling it, hearing it.
My home is in Ketchikan, Alaska, which is an island,
Revillagigedo Island in Southeast Alaska.
So if you look around, all we have, we have a lot of wood,
but what's not wood are the floors.
The floors are cement.
That was a priority that I let the architects know.
I want cement floors, and I want them heated.
- Concrete's heavy, right?
The challenge was that we wanted to create this cantilever.
So in this case, we did design
with our engineer a cantilevered slab
and a pretty significant stem wall that holds that
to create the effect that you get in the house.
And when you put a hydronic heating system in there,
they have a warmth to them that, when you're there
and you're walking on 'em, you're feeling that radiant heat.
They're very durable, they're beautiful.
- And you can see there's a lot of pink in this house.
The kitchen's pink. I'm even wearing pink slippers today.
It's a color that, I wouldn't say I love pink,
but it does seem to be a thread that I've always
carried through in my selection of interiors.
I had this on the if I ever build a house idea in my head,
this is what I wanted.
It's the Lacanche range from France.
It's a French cooking top with the saute part on that.
The two ovens, there's the electric and gas.
(gentle music)
My water is all catched from a cistern.
So all this is rainwater.
- That water is collected,
it goes through a purification process.
- But here the cisterns.
You can see how the rainwater's caught and comes down
and fills these tanks.
And the shower, the laundry, everything is rainwater.
- When you're looking at this from a site plan
or from a floor plan view, you'll see that there are
two main volumes and then this interstitial space
that creates a second volume in the deck and the entry
and then the reading nook.
- What I wanted with the deck space was covered.
We get a lot of rain.
We don't get the snow that you think of as Alaska,
but we get rain, probably 177 inches of rain.
That's a lot of rain.
So when people say it rains in Seattle,
they haven't been to Ketchikan, Alaska
For some reason, I collected kilims.
I've traveled a lot through Turkey, India,
and I would get carpets.
And we can even see them over here in the nook
where I had one made into pillows.
So we cut the kilim, it was old, it was kind of beat up,
and then we made it into pillows for the nook.
Again, that feeling of a Turkish tea room,
what I was going with 'cause there's just lots of coziness,
pillows in those tea houses.
So I can have my tea here but I just read,
I sit here, it's comfortable.
Yellow cedar's indigenous to southeast Alaska,
so really wanted yellow cedar to use it.
- When we use those products that are local materials,
it just sort of adds to the connection to the place,
and it also saves cost because we don't need to ship
that material from far away.
- And now I'll show you the rest of the house.
So here's the primary bedroom and then my favorite part.
And what I really wanted was this egg chair
so that I could sit and watch the water.
- So when I'm looking this direction down the coastline,
I can see that volume extend out
and I can see the chair hanging in the corner.
But at the same time, I can't see enough of the bedroom
where it feels overly exposed.
When you're in the bedroom,
you're seeing the living room volume cantilever.
You get that kind of understanding
of the space that you're in.
- Outside of finding the wood and the elements
that we used to build the house that were here,
we had to ship a lot of things.
So just the bedding, the furniture,
probably in the budget about 40,000.
So it was under that, it came to $38,000 for freight.
- And that's about 30 to 50% more
than I would see in an urban house.
(gentle regal music)
When we are approaching a site,
especially a beautiful site like this,
we're looking at not only where we have interior spaces
but where we have exterior spaces.
- Let's go outside now.
Now what I really, really wanted
when I talked to the landscaper was a strawberry wall.
So again, accomplished.
We have lots of strawberries planted
throughout the rock work.
There's so many, oh my goodness.
Look at them all growing, and they vine.
So over the years, the expectation is
it's just gonna be covered in strawberries.
I'll pick them, I'll eat them fresh, I'll make jams.
They work well with rhubarb, which is right here too.
I grow a lot of rhubarb
because it also grows well in Southeast Alaska.
The landscaping budget was 100,000,
and I know I used that whole budget amount.
I'm the pediatric dentist and I was contracting services
with the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium.
There wasn't a presence
for a pediatric specialist in Ketchikan.
So with the help of the Indian Health Service,
I started a business here, a practice.
We're in a place that it's all about water.
We live on an island, so I think reflecting that
in your home is a space I wanna be in, I enjoy being in.
I worked closely with my banker, you know,
"We're gonna give you a loan to build this house."
The total came to about 2,070,000.
And at the end of the day, he said,
"I do want you to know it's," what he called a vanity house.
So that's kind of what we call this.
Don't look at it as this investment
that's going to make you money down the road.
It's your home, it's what you wanna be.
But we have that joke. We call it the vanity house.