Collection by Miyoko Ohtake
Seattle, Part Two
Earlier this week, I headed to Seattle to report a story for an upcoming issue and to run around town to find the best food, furnishings, and other local favorites. Part one of my trip was bookended with croissants and Korean tacos and filled with glimpses of the Olympic Sculpture Park, city bike racks, freeway underpasses, and more. Here we pick up halfway through day two of my three-day trip.
My favorite part of the library is easy to miss. Located on the fourth floor, the meeting room level is quite literally the heart of the building. Not only is it centrally located but it is painted wall-to-wall, top-to-bottom in a deep red shade and is shaped in a way that is reminiscent of the chambers of the heart. Shown here is a view from the fourth floor overlooking the reading areas below.
Next, at editor Jaime Gross's suggestion, I headed north to Ballard and to the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks, more often referred to as simply the Ballard Locks. Connected to the Carl S. English, Jr. Botanical Gardens, the area offers quite a lot to take in. I was fortunate enough to catch two fishing boats pass through the locks—which mitigate the 20-22 foot difference between Lake Washington and Lake Union and prevent the mix of Puget Sound's saltwater with the lakes' freshwater. The most popular attraction here, however, is the fish ladder, which allows salmon to make their migratory runs and features five viewing windows, where I spotted a couple handfuls of nearly four-foot-long fish.
Before I met a friend for dinner at the French restaurant Bastille, I headed down to the edge of Salmon Bay to check in on the tiny 800-square-foot home atop a huge warehouse that I wrote about earlier this year for our Small Spaces issue. The vines along the warehouse wall's were much fuller than when we photographed the residence but besides that, everything looked quite the same—and quite lovely. (Click here to read the Sky Small story.)
The next morning, I started my day at the Henrybuilt and Viola Park showroom downtown. Though two separate companies, they are run by the same people and their products are both manufactured in the same factory in SoDo, a Seattle neighborhood whose nickname is short for "south of downtown." Whereas Henrybuilt is completely customizable and starts with extensive design work between the client and the company, Viola Park is a less expensive, modular kitchen and living solution.
After the tour, I stopped by the Seattle Art Museum for its new Picasso exhibit, on view through January 17, 2011. The show displays works from the artist's personal collection, usually housed at the Musée National Picasso in Paris, and includes iconic masterpieces like La Celestina from his Blue Period, the Man with a Guitar from his early Cubist work, and The Matador, among others. Having worked up an appetite, I strolled down to Salumi, a cured meat shop owned by Armandino Batali, Mario Batali's father.
Hale and Schaer built most of the office's structures themselves, including the back loft working area and its steps, covered in artificial turf. Though Shed Built was founded as a design-build office, when its four principals became just two, Hale and Schaer decided that the only way in which they would become better at designing would be to do more design, so they dropped the build half of their business.
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