Storybook House

1941 American Home magazine

[The following was written by Mandus E. Bridston, Port Blakely, WA in 1941 and published in American Home magazine. We calculate that it had about 600 sq. ft. on the main floor with another 300-400 upstairs. Does anyone know if it is still standing? Ed.]

At first sight, the summer home of Mr. and Mrs. H. J. Quilliam near Seattle, Wash., is surprisingly like a picture in a child's storybook. Some of the house-for-Goldilocks illusion is due to the fact that the roof of hand-split shakes slopes picturesquely low and there's a unique log wall construction.

It was the owner's own idea to use five and a half cords of cedar logs cut in fifteen-inch lengths and lay up walls with them, installing them endwise. The round, sawed-off ends of the logs provide an irregular, patterned wall surface on both the inside and outside of the house. The blocks are set in mortar and are being allows to darken naturally at each end. They're in varied sizes, some irregularly three or four inches in diameter, others seeming almost as large and perfectly round as a full moon.

The fifteen-inch-thick outside walls provide attractively deep window recesses in the living room as well as usefully deep sills for keeping books, bowls of flowers, sewing baskets, and collections of miniature bottles.

There's an ingenious red brick fireplace here which also serves as a stair to upstairs sleeping rooms, stepping up about the low hearth and provided with a two-inch rubbed cedar rail. The fireplace side of the room is done in knotty cedar boarding, including the door at the head of the stair. Corner supports of the house walls are in brick also for contract and rigidity, along with the uncovered outdoor terrace which extends the full length of the rear of the house and commands a view of sky, sea, and forest. The outdoor fireplace is near by.

Source

Bridston, Mandus E. "Storybook House." American Home, August, 1941.

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