BUNGALOW REBORN
It took education and elbow grease to bring this Wallingford house back home
 

	THE DINING ROOM has fir woodwork, box beams and built-in cabinetry with leaded glass. The round dining table and chairs are original Stickley designs. The stairs leading to the second-floor landing have been restored.

"IF HE HADN'T been an architect, it would have been totally scary," says Marleigh Driscoll about the oversized bungalow she and her husband Matt have been restoring and upgrading for 13 years. During the nine months when most of the major work was being done on the 3,400-square-foot house, "We rented the house across the street and Matt was over here every day."

For Matt, this house remodel was a very different challenge from his normal work. His firm designs apartments and condominiums, many of them in highly visible locations, such as the Regata near Lake Union's Gas Works Park. He has also tackled renovations on historic properties, such as Belltown's Guiry-Shillstad building, a City of Seattle landmark.

The Driscolls lived in Ballard in a tiny 1920s bungalow and needed more space for themselves and their daughter when they started looking in the Wallingford neighborhood. Coincidentally, Matt had grown up nearby. He remembers, "I actually delivered newspapers to this house when I was a kid for my one stint as a newspaper boy. Some of the kids who grew up here were in high school with me."

They are only the third owners of the house. The second family lived in it for about 40 years before selling to people who wanted to make it a boarding home. Fortunately for the Driscolls, they couldn't get permits to do that in the single-family residential neighborhood.
 

AS IS TRUE of so many bungalows, the hearth is a visual and spiritual focal point. This one is a warm gray brick with rough-cut stone and green mottled tile floor. The chair is a reissue of a Harvey Ellis design for Gustav Stickley.

"They were going to make rooms out of closets — they are so big," Marleigh recalls. When that sale fell through, the Driscolls bought the home for $220,000 in 1989. Its condition reflected years of deferred maintenance and 1960s-era modernizations. "When we moved in," says Marleigh, "there was orange shag carpet on floors and on the stairs. My 5-year-old daughter liked that because she could slide down the stairs."

The Driscolls have tried to turn the clock back by removing the '60s look and using a vocabulary of materials and details that fit the era when the house was built. But they also have replaced original systems such as plumbing and heating with more efficient ones.

At first, Matt thought he could repair the exterior siding but, as he evaluated the increasing amount of time and effort required, he chose instead to sheathe the house with wood shingles consistent with its period.

Of the interiors, Matt says, "What we were looking for was a house where the woodwork wasn't painted. In this house, the bathrooms and kitchen had been remodeled and none of the original lighting fixtures were left. The rest had been neglected, except for the ceilings." These had been treated with sprayed asbestos "popcorn." Fortunately, the fir box beams in the dining room had been left unpainted, as had fir paneling, divider columns and built-ins that are the trademarks of the bungalow style.

"We had the popcorn ceiling cleaned out, I cleaned the floors, and we moved in," says Matt. They painted the inside guided by the Sherwin Williams Preservation Palette, specifically the Roycroft color charts recommended for homes of the Arts & Crafts period. After finding where the originals had been, they installed reproduction light fixtures from Rejuvenation Hardware in Portland.
 

	BUILT IN 1914, this Wallingford bungalow shows off new shingles and copper gutters and downspouts. The retaining walls, steps and garage are new.

They were fortunate that the built-in sideboard in the dining room retained its original leaded glass. Only one cabinet door had broken glass, and Seattle Stained Glass repaired it. While the cabinets had original hinges, the drawers were missing their pulls. Reproduction hardware solved the problem for these, the entry door and the front-door buzzer.

Workers cleaned the fir woodwork and refinished it to match the original color. Upstairs the woodwork had been stripped and was substantially lighter than the woodwork on the main floor. "We restained that to get closer to the original color." They also had the aged baluster crown and the newel post rebuilt. Oak flooring beneath the shag carpeting was refinished. For the most part, they retained the original windows.

Adjoining the living room is a music room and a room that may originally have been a bedroom or nursery but now serves as a library. The Driscolls combined these two rooms, built a half wall and pillar divider and floor-to-ceiling bookcases.

A back hall provides a service spine behind the living and dining areas. Marmoleum flooring has been used here and in the kitchen. This is a traditional linseed-flooring product now manufactured in Amsterdam. The main-floor bathroom has been reconfigured for more efficient space.

The kitchen has also been completely redone with fir cabinetry. While they couldn't expand the kitchen, the couple did achieve a more spacious feeling by removing a dropped ceiling to gain 1 1/2 feet, installing taller windows and moving the doorway.

The second floor has a master bedroom, two other bedrooms (one now being used as a home office) and a sewing room that may once have been a small sitting area or sewing room. Fir flooring was cleaned and the bathroom was renewed with bead-board wainscot and period-respectful cabinetry and fixtures.

THE LIBRARY WAS a back bedroom until the Driscolls installed bookcases. The library ladder is from Putnam Rolling Library Co. of New York.

THE COUPLE PLANTED a pleasant perennial garden on the west side of the house, shielded from the street by fencing and arbors.

 

A Home Fair, lectures and tour

Is it more difficult to design your own home than to work for a client? Matt is quick to respond, "This was more fun." He also recognizes the education required — the long planning process that stimulated decision-making. "For months and months we would look through every home-remodel magazine and American Bungalow — all the back issues. We got Jane Powell's 'Bungalow Kitchens.' We had every bungalow book on the market."

Marleigh chimes in, "You get more deeply into it when it's yours. You can make any decision you want and the client is not going to object." But the payoff for the Driscolls is that visitors can't tell anything has been done. The new work merges seamlessly with the original. And that's a sign their work has been a success.

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