January: AIA Home of the Month
| By Lisa Wogan |
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When Julie Lumpkin stopped by a one-bedroom carriage house in Madison Park three years ago, she was simply indulging a favorite pastime of open-house-hopping while her husband was out of town. However, the corner lot, bordered by mature, leafy trees and kitty-corner from the elementary school she wanted her children to attend, demanded action.
“I walked through it with our kids and I called Toby and I said, ‘Toby, we just bought a house,’” Lumpkin remembers. That’s not as rash as it might sound. For more than seven years, the Lumpkins had been in the habit of moving and renovating (even building one other new home) as frequently as some folks change the oil in their car. It helps that Toby is a general contractor and owner of The Lumpkin Company.
The cherry trees, maples and magnolias that captured Julie’s heart became the central inspiration and touchstone for the four-bedroom, 4,200-square-foot home they would build on the footprint of the original house.
“We wanted to maximize the outdoors,” Julie says, to make it like a walk through the trees. Toby, 38, from Seattle and Julie, 37, from Kalispell, Montana, love the outdoors. They met in Sun Valley, Idaho, when Toby was a fry cook and Julie was a waitress. Today, she works in marketing and brand management as a principal at Swift Group Marketing.
They also share a passion for architecture, design and a clean, modern aesthetic, which they brought to their collaboration with Tom Lambright of Lambright Design Group, a residential architect in Ravenna. Together, they came up with a roof shaped like butterfly “wings” that slope up gently from the center to draw in sunlight from the north and south through celestory windows that ring the entire structure. A separate central roof panel with a long skylight runs along the north-south axis, sloping down to the north to funnel off water and capture even more sun in the south.
As a builder, materials mattered to Toby. “I wanted a strong concrete design,” he says. Floors on the first level are polished concrete and the structural core of the house comprises two, two-story, exposed, poured concrete walls that run north to south and divide the house into three units: an entry area, great room and living and utility spaces downstairs and a children’s suite, separate from the master suite upstairs. A detached below-grade, three-car garage is tucked under the backyard.
The heart of the house is an open, two-story atrium flanked by rough, textured concrete and glass. Natural light pours in from every direction, even from below, when sunlight reflects off an outdoor moat. At the north end, trees create an ever-changing curtain across a wall of glass with an enormous pivot door in the middle. Despite the door’s dimensions—9 feet wide by 17 feet tall and 3,500 pounds—a 15-year-old black Labrador retriever, Miss Madison, “can move it with her nose.” That gesture obliterates the line between indoors and outdoors with gusts of fresh air and the sound of rustling leaves and a waterfall. A dining room table hewn from a 16-foot, rough sawn plank of Douglas fir anchors the space.
Throughout the house, the interiors are simple with a few materials used consistently and a black/gray/white palette that plays up the colors and light outside and, someday, an art collection inside. Most of the walls and ceilings are white. The cabinetry, built by Lumpkin Company carpenters, is dark, rift-sawn oak with simple, stainless pulls. The stairway is the same oak with steel. The kitchen backsplash is black slate and the countertops are Pietro Del Cordosa stone, black with faint white veins. The bathrooms feature white tile and white Carrara marble.
As part of the unfussy look, the couple went with baseless drywall, so that the wall seems to float slightly above the floor. It’s tough to maintain, however. “Anytime the vacuum cleaner bumps into it, it chips,” Toby says. Because he’s seen this problem more than once, he has incorporated a fix into new projects: lining the base with chip-proof wood that has been taped over so that it’s flush with the sheetrock.
The Lumpkins’ house contains minimal furnishings and no clutter. Even the kitchen is streamlined. Because it’s open to the living room and dining room, Julie wanted to minimize stainless steel appliances with a “furnitureish” look. Two stacked ovens are hidden behind the kitchen, next to pantry cupboards, and the Wolf, six-burner, gas cook-top sits on top of two deep drawers. A butler’s pantry in a utility zone behind the kitchen (which also includes an office, mudroom, au pair apartment and back door) serves as an out-of-view area for typical kitchen flotsam, such as coffee makers and toasters. “If there is any space that I took for granted, it’s this space,” Toby says. “We use this all the time. It’s so handy and it doesn’t have to look nice when you have guests over.”
There is a downside to so much concrete. “When the children and their four cousins are here, it is shockingly loud,” Toby says. Happily, an arty wall installation, composed of squares of rigid insulation covered with stained plaster, fashioned by carpenter Sam Allard, has made a positive acoustical impact. Hand-woven rugs that the Lumpkins brought home in backpacks from Kazakhstan also help with noise abatement, as well as adding splashes of warmth and color.
The muted, organic hues carry out to the house’s crisp exterior of gray cement stucco and horizontal cedar siding. Only the original ornate iron gates attached to a low brick perimeter wall seem out of place. “They don’t go with the house at all,” says Toby, who elected to keep them, “but they tell a little bit of the history of the site.”
They also help this new house settle into the neighborhood, which is exactly what Toby and Julie Lumpkin and their son, 8 years old, and daughter, 6, intend to do. After five moves in seven years, they have a light-filled dream house and agree, “We’re done.”
Open House Tour
Our ongoing partnership with the American Institute of Architects Seattle Chapter (AIA Seattle) continues our commitment to bring the experience of Puget Sound–area residential design to our readers. Each issue, we showcase an architect-designed home, selected by AIA Seattle and Northwest Home, which will be open to the public for a Sunday-afternoon viewing. We invite you to tour this issue’s featured home, designed by Tom Lambright of Lambright Design Group, located in Madison Park at 1530 38th Ave. E, on Sunday, January 18, between noon and 3 p.m. For more information on the tour and the Open House program, please visit nwhome.com or aiaseattle.org; 206.448.4938.
“I walked through it with our kids and I called Toby and I said, ‘Toby, we just bought a house,’” Lumpkin remembers. That’s not as rash as it might sound. For more than seven years, the Lumpkins had been in the habit of moving and renovating (even building one other new home) as frequently as some folks change the oil in their car. It helps that Toby is a general contractor and owner of The Lumpkin Company.
The cherry trees, maples and magnolias that captured Julie’s heart became the central inspiration and touchstone for the four-bedroom, 4,200-square-foot home they would build on the footprint of the original house.
“We wanted to maximize the outdoors,” Julie says, to make it like a walk through the trees. Toby, 38, from Seattle and Julie, 37, from Kalispell, Montana, love the outdoors. They met in Sun Valley, Idaho, when Toby was a fry cook and Julie was a waitress. Today, she works in marketing and brand management as a principal at Swift Group Marketing.
They also share a passion for architecture, design and a clean, modern aesthetic, which they brought to their collaboration with Tom Lambright of Lambright Design Group, a residential architect in Ravenna. Together, they came up with a roof shaped like butterfly “wings” that slope up gently from the center to draw in sunlight from the north and south through celestory windows that ring the entire structure. A separate central roof panel with a long skylight runs along the north-south axis, sloping down to the north to funnel off water and capture even more sun in the south.
As a builder, materials mattered to Toby. “I wanted a strong concrete design,” he says. Floors on the first level are polished concrete and the structural core of the house comprises two, two-story, exposed, poured concrete walls that run north to south and divide the house into three units: an entry area, great room and living and utility spaces downstairs and a children’s suite, separate from the master suite upstairs. A detached below-grade, three-car garage is tucked under the backyard.
The heart of the house is an open, two-story atrium flanked by rough, textured concrete and glass. Natural light pours in from every direction, even from below, when sunlight reflects off an outdoor moat. At the north end, trees create an ever-changing curtain across a wall of glass with an enormous pivot door in the middle. Despite the door’s dimensions—9 feet wide by 17 feet tall and 3,500 pounds—a 15-year-old black Labrador retriever, Miss Madison, “can move it with her nose.” That gesture obliterates the line between indoors and outdoors with gusts of fresh air and the sound of rustling leaves and a waterfall. A dining room table hewn from a 16-foot, rough sawn plank of Douglas fir anchors the space.
Throughout the house, the interiors are simple with a few materials used consistently and a black/gray/white palette that plays up the colors and light outside and, someday, an art collection inside. Most of the walls and ceilings are white. The cabinetry, built by Lumpkin Company carpenters, is dark, rift-sawn oak with simple, stainless pulls. The stairway is the same oak with steel. The kitchen backsplash is black slate and the countertops are Pietro Del Cordosa stone, black with faint white veins. The bathrooms feature white tile and white Carrara marble.
As part of the unfussy look, the couple went with baseless drywall, so that the wall seems to float slightly above the floor. It’s tough to maintain, however. “Anytime the vacuum cleaner bumps into it, it chips,” Toby says. Because he’s seen this problem more than once, he has incorporated a fix into new projects: lining the base with chip-proof wood that has been taped over so that it’s flush with the sheetrock.
The Lumpkins’ house contains minimal furnishings and no clutter. Even the kitchen is streamlined. Because it’s open to the living room and dining room, Julie wanted to minimize stainless steel appliances with a “furnitureish” look. Two stacked ovens are hidden behind the kitchen, next to pantry cupboards, and the Wolf, six-burner, gas cook-top sits on top of two deep drawers. A butler’s pantry in a utility zone behind the kitchen (which also includes an office, mudroom, au pair apartment and back door) serves as an out-of-view area for typical kitchen flotsam, such as coffee makers and toasters. “If there is any space that I took for granted, it’s this space,” Toby says. “We use this all the time. It’s so handy and it doesn’t have to look nice when you have guests over.”
There is a downside to so much concrete. “When the children and their four cousins are here, it is shockingly loud,” Toby says. Happily, an arty wall installation, composed of squares of rigid insulation covered with stained plaster, fashioned by carpenter Sam Allard, has made a positive acoustical impact. Hand-woven rugs that the Lumpkins brought home in backpacks from Kazakhstan also help with noise abatement, as well as adding splashes of warmth and color.
The muted, organic hues carry out to the house’s crisp exterior of gray cement stucco and horizontal cedar siding. Only the original ornate iron gates attached to a low brick perimeter wall seem out of place. “They don’t go with the house at all,” says Toby, who elected to keep them, “but they tell a little bit of the history of the site.”
They also help this new house settle into the neighborhood, which is exactly what Toby and Julie Lumpkin and their son, 8 years old, and daughter, 6, intend to do. After five moves in seven years, they have a light-filled dream house and agree, “We’re done.”
Open House Tour
Our ongoing partnership with the American Institute of Architects Seattle Chapter (AIA Seattle) continues our commitment to bring the experience of Puget Sound–area residential design to our readers. Each issue, we showcase an architect-designed home, selected by AIA Seattle and Northwest Home, which will be open to the public for a Sunday-afternoon viewing. We invite you to tour this issue’s featured home, designed by Tom Lambright of Lambright Design Group, located in Madison Park at 1530 38th Ave. E, on Sunday, January 18, between noon and 3 p.m. For more information on the tour and the Open House program, please visit nwhome.com or aiaseattle.org; 206.448.4938.
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