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The
House and Land

So far we still feel like we're crashing at some rich dude's place, so stunning is this, our new home base. It even justifies a page on this site - a tribute to its simplicity, effectiveness and all round sense of quality design (it was designed by architect David Hall, and was featured in Fine Homebuilding, Issue #94, Spring 1995). With our obsessive focus on finding or building a Microship lab, the very last thing we expected or even cared about was a decent house... we fully expected to end up settling for something awful, probably a drafty corner of the lab itself. But we got lucky.

 front
solarium The house is a long rectangle perched atop a red ground-concrete slab that resembles an exotic form of terazzo, with a roof of metal sheet (apart from the Solarium and eaves which are made from corrugated translucent fiberglass). The Solarium is the first room you enter from the front and is a warm, bright area, designed to passively solar-heat the house with a glass roll-up door that brings the yard into our home when opened. This, coupled with the transparent roof, allows the room to quickly heat up and trigger two wall fans which distribute the hot air around the rest of the house.
There are double doors flanking both sides of the Solarium, and if you take the one to your left you will come into the Dreamworks - a place where nautical charts and books are displayed and all is geared toward encouraging our Nautical Dementia. There are two utilities off this room - a half bathroom and the hot water heater closet, which also feeds a three-zone radiant heating system (amazingly effective, given the 12-inch R-40 structural foamcore panels that comprise the roof). java
kitchen Swinging round will bring you into the kitchen, a long galley shape with one wall of windows and glass shelves that allows you to look up from doing the dishes and peer through the Solarium, across Saratoga Passage and Whidbey Island, and all the way to the snow-capped Olympic Mountains on clear days. Continuing through the kitchen brings you into the livingroom, where the center of attraction (apart from the hammock when it's deployed) is the beautiful Danish wood stove which, while roasting the house, also has a pizza oven in the top.
Beyond is a modest bedroom, and a bathroom with sliding doors and a Japanese soaking tub... which, paradoxically, is what caught our eye in the first place, though we almost never actually use it in practice (especially since we installed a rear deck with a hot tub). lounge
lawn tashachick
house This house on Camano Island uses modest materials in a practical yet elegant manner which we find perfectly reflects the Microship design philosophy. With 11 acres of woods isolating us, chickens scratching in the yard, gardens sprouting goodies, and Java-the-cat playing Queen of the Jungle or watching "World TV" in the Solarium, The Nomadic Research Labs Compound has been established!