[music playing]
PAIGE STOCKLEY: When I leave Seattle,
I feel my stress levels just, like, dropping.
And then when I come down the driveway
into the walnut tree and the cherry tree
and I enter this house, I just love that feeling
of just coming here.
This house for me was all about food and cooking
because that's our family.
We're food family.
We spent a lot of time harvesting
oysters and catching crab.
I really was looking for a place that I felt
would bring me closer to them.
It's very restorative to come out here.
These are very fresh, and they're called Pacifics.
That's the kind of oyster it is.
And there's a whole history to that.
Aren't they pretty?
The cove of Holly is in the Pacific Northwest.
Holly is really rural, the beautiful forests everywhere
and wildlife everywhere.
The other side is the Olympic mountain range,
and that's all state park over there.
And then right along the shore is Highway 101.
[music playing]
I am a professional cellist, so I play in orchestras and string
quartets.
And I also teach.
Music is a really stressful profession
because you really have to be perfect all the time.
So coming out here is a nice break from the stress.
I got married in 2002, and my daughter was born in 2004.
We have, like, the super urban house in Seattle.
We like being in the city, but I was very really adamant
about having my daughter have some sort
of country type experience.
I wanted her to have a place where she'd be on the beach
and, like, swimming and building tree forts.
We have a lot of memories here as a family.
My grandparents had a cabin Holly,
and I was married at Holly.
And my father really loved being at Holly getting crabs
and oysters, and I wanted to do something that connected
me with my family memories.
So I bought the property in 2009,
and when I came here in the dead of winter,
there was like this riding double wide
and it was like cement everywhere
and there was another-- there was two garages
and they were condemned.
And the septic had burst and not pretty.
And a lot of overgrown weeds and a creek there's a wash out.
But, of course, I knew that the land was amazing
because this 160 feet of waterfront,
so you have this beautiful beach.
We demolished everything a complete clean slate,
so there was no architectural history whatsoever.
And so then how do I find an architect
to build this future beach house that I had no idea
what it was going to look like.
So I started to look at coffee table books,
and there was this beautiful house on the cover.
And I looked up the back to see who the architect was,
and it was Andrew Borges.
ANDREW BORGES: Paige called us kind of out of the blue,
and so we basically worked with her in the beginning
just to make sure that we could actually
do what she was imagining might be able to happen out here.
So we did a feasibility study, and that sort of
kicked off kind of a design process in earnest.
[music playing]
PAIGE STOCKLEY: You head towards the water
and it's a long kind of skinny driveway with beautiful trees
and cedars.
And to the left is the guest house.
Straight ahead is the house.
To the right is the creek where we have
the tent and the salmon hut.
Enter through the front door and then there's the kitchen right
there and then the dining room and you see all the windows
and the deck facing the water.
ANDREW BORGES: The house is about 1,200 square feet
on the main level, and then the loft is
another 400 square feet or so.
It's a compact little structure.
From the beginning, this house is really
going to be about entertaining and connecting with people,
and we knew because we had a limited footprint
to work within, the spaces weren't
going to be able to be huge.
And so the kitchen really grew out
of this idea of wanting something
that was super compact but super functional.
PAIGE STOCKLEY: Then in the back of the house
are two bedrooms and two bathrooms.
Then you had up the stairs, and at the very top of the stairs
is a little landing with a sitting room.
And then you come into this very high gabled high ceiling room
which we call kind of the sleeping porch and those four
little twin nooks.
My original idea was that my daughter would have her friends
and they'd have, like, places to sleep,
and you have two or three families here.
ANDREW BORGES: Daisy being younger, bringing friends out
to create kind of a sleeping loft where each of the kids
might have their own little sleeping nook.
PAIGE STOCKLEY: Right. Kind of like a train.
ANDREW BORGES: Yeah.
PAIGE STOCKLEY: Yeah.
ANDREW BORGES: Yeah, so I think that was sort of my mind, kind
of the genesis of the bunks on either side
of that kind of big hall. PAIGE STOCKLEY: Right.
And the funny thing is the grown-up--
the grown ups love the bunks.
They all want to sleep on-- ANDREW BORGES: It's too funny.
PAIGE STOCKLEY: They call them the nooks,
but they all wanna sleep there. ANDREW BORGES: The nooks.
PAIGE STOCKLEY: Yeah.
So the house I think is about maybe four bedroom,
but it's more like the upstairs is kind of a big sleeping loft.
And then we also have a guest house because sometimes
someone wants some privacy.
This used to be a garage, and I got rid of that garage.
And so, you know, Andrew designed this beautiful guest
house, which is kind of like a little temple
because it's got a really high ceiling.
And it's kind of a replica of the main house, which I like.
I like the connection.
If I do have a rehearsal, like, with my string quartet,
this works really well.
Just push that out and voila.
What I love about what Andrew did
is it's, like, pretty small, but with the height,
it feels really spacious.
With Andrew and I talking about what the outside of the house
was going to look like, this old Holly schoolhouse,
this 100-year-old schoolhouse just up the road that Holly
children used to go-- attend in 1922,
looks pretty much like this, brown shingled
with, like, white trim.
And I've always loved that building, and my husband
and I were married there.
And there's these wonderful community potlucks
there and Christmas parties.
It's very-- I'm very nostalgic with the Holly schoolhouse.
And so when we were talking about what the outside would
look like, I said let's make it look
like the Holly schoolhouse.
[music playing]
ANDREW BORGES: It's a hybrid of a lot of different influences
and languages, and I was always sort of taken
with kind of the simplicity and rigor of kind
of the Shaker architecture.
A lot of it is, you know, the built ins, and everything
having a place and a place for everything
is kind of a very Shaker idea.
I think the use of the fir as kind of a dominant wood
both on the floor and in the structure I think
was an attempt to tie it into the Northwest
but then the Italian tile, the French fireplace, the,
you know, in sort of detail, I mean, the English tub.
PAIGE STOCKLEY: Quaker French beach house Northwest house.
Cottage.
PAIGE STOCKLEY: The house began to take shape,
and it looked like it was going to be completed pretty soon.
Then the big question of what to put inside the house.
My goal with the house was to pay homage to my childhood,
honor the memory of my dad and my family.
It was in the year 2000, and I was 38 years old.
My parents were in Mexico vacationing,
and they were flying home.
There was trouble with the plane,
and the plane just dropped from the sky
and crashed into the ocean.
All 88 people died including my parents.
[music playing]
That was a very sad and devastating time in my life,
and so I decided that, you know, I
wanted to buy a property that would
just bring me back to memories of my parents and my childhood.
MICHELLE BURGESS: Paige's parents were really
just amazing couple, so when Paige told me
about the property and that she wanted to do something special
out here in memory of her parents
and that she'd come out here, that took this project
to a whole different place.
There had been this great photo.
I wanted that photograph to be something other than just,
like, a family photo.
I wanted it to have a different kind of presence,
so I had it mounted behind plaques because plaques on top
would only add to the depth of that video still.
And it's a wonderful--
PAIGE STOCKLEY: It's kind of blurry.
MICHELLE BURGESS: That's my memorial to your parents.
I wanted nothing to interfere with the view hence the chose
glass, you know, because it also will not sort of impose itself.
You can look past it through it.
And that drove the selection of the piece
that I did over the dining room table.
How to tie the house to its environment.
So the environment came inside the house.
That's what I was hoping for.
This house has one big great room down here,
and, you know, Paige likes to have lots of people out.
We need to be able to get six to eight people
in a pretty small footprint.
And so I said I think the solution's gonna
be two long bench cushion type sofas that can-- you know,
four people can sit on it.
PAIGE STOCKLEY: We hang out here a lot actually at night.
MICHELLE BURGESS: Look at that one.
Eight-- it's a cutie.
And kind of cute small.
Nine-- so you get the winning 10.
This is pretty. It's already opened.
Look at that one.
Take it for yourself.
That would be good-- look good on your mantel.
- My mantel. - Once you dry it--
How about my other stuff--
Just dry it so it doesn't stink up your house.
- Yeah. - You know.
[music playing]
PAIGE STOCKLEY: This is a called Hood Canal,
and it's well known for its oysters.
These Hood Canal oysters are exported everywhere.
Oysters are a big part of my family
because we used to, you know, go oyster hunting with my dad,
but coming to this house, the people that knew the area,
they said this beach has, like, more oysters than any place
at Holly.
It's like there's literally thousands, thousands of oysters
just literally for the taking.
You, just, like, grab it and put in your bucket,
so there's no oyster hunting.
You just gather.
And so, you know, when we come here, that's, like,
the highlight is oyster party.
[chatter]
[non-english]
Yeah, it's fun when you've done, like, the--
The hunting?
The hunting.
Even though I didn't grow up in this property or in this house,
but I feel really close to both my parents
when I come here in the beginning especially looking
for something to connect me to what
I had lost because, you know, I had childhood memories here.
I appreciate you all.
But then I have to say since then it's evolved in
not as a memory house but as a sort of a living place
where I've met new friends.
I've had these great neighbors.
My friends who are into food and wine
love to come here and cook and enjoy the view and sip wine.
It's turned into something more present in my life,
and it ended up kind of moving into my future.
[music playing]