SEATTLE

TO get to the top of the world, Petra Franklin Lahaie ushers her two young daughters and their girly bikes through a set of heavy bronze doors, greets the 24-hour elevator operator in the Prussian blue uniform, rides up 35 stories past mostly vacant office suites, debarks next to an observation deck and Chinese-themed banquet room, passes through a portal marked “private residence,” climbs two stories into a neo-gothic pyramid and enters a penthouse apartment.

She pauses to scoop up an armful of scattered toys, then mounts another flight of stairs, crosses the living room, circles 38 steps on a cast-iron stairwell (“Look the other way,” she may call to someone below as she gathers her billowing dress around her calves), hauls herself up 13 rungs in a narrow vertical shaft, and emerges  at last!  into a glass globe 462 feet above this city.

But how did Ms. Franklin really get here? That is, how did this 46-year-old choreographer-turned-venture-capitalist-turned-no-nanny mom win a long-term lease on what may be the most extraordinary apartment in the city: the space at the top of the historic Smith Tower in Pioneer Square?

Well, she decided she wanted to live there, of course. And Ms. Franklin  who is either a “dynamo,” a “ball of fire” or a “highly determined woman,” depending on whom you ask  has a habit of getting what she wants.