Neskowin, a small village on the Oregon coast about 100 miles southwest of Portland, offers a magical mixture of natural wonders: a dune-covered beach to the west, and the protected Neskowin Creek watershed to the east.

Along tiny Hawk Street, where several homes were built in the mid-20th century, a multigenerational community of longtime homeowners often host neighbors or socialize on the little private lane connecting their houses. Many of these houses were designed by noted Portland architects, like Van Evera Bailey, who collectively created the Northwest modern style: pitched overhanging roofs, large expanses of glass, and extensive wood.

It’s no wonder Jamie Watson and Cleo Pahlmeyer weren’t going to let their heirloom little Neskowin beach house go—even though a restoration was perhaps overdue.

The 1,400-square-foot home has been in Jamie’s family for three generations—it first belonged to his grandfather, a Portland physician. Jamie’s wife, Cleo, grew up visiting Neskowin as a child, too, staying at her uncle and aunt’s house nearby—and the couple actually first met on Hawk Street as 10-year-olds. “Jamie’s family would host Christmas Day dinner, and then our family or our neighbors would host New Year’s Eve,” Cleo recalls.

Before: Exterior

After: Exterior

After starting their own family a decade ago, Jamie and Cleo continued going to Jamie’s parents’ house with their children (daughters Violet and Maeve, now 9 and 4, and son Teddy, 7), making the 10-hour drive north from their home in Napa, California, where Cleo runs her family’s winery.

“We got engaged in front of that beach house,” Jamie says. “Neskowin is kind of the spiritual home of the family. We just really wanted to keep it because it was such a special spot to me and Cleo.” So when Jamie’s parents decided it was time to sell, he and Cleo decided the house mattered enough to them to buy it themselves.

Before: Living Room

After: Living Room

The Watson family beach house was built in 1946 (its original architect unknown), with Douglas fir-paneled walls and a kitchen and a small living room wrapping a small courtyard. In the 1960s, Bailey expanded the home by walling in the courtyard to create a combined living/dining area. A later 1970s remodel swapped the fir walls for cheaper wood paneling, and installed lower ceilings to conserve energy. When Cleo and Jamie acquired it, the three-bedroom family cabin was a product of its various eras—none of which seemed to fully embrace the landscape.

Despite its added space, the combined living/dining room had come to feel cramped, in part because a TV and entertainment center was squeezed into a small portion of the wall beside the entry to the kitchen. The rooms also felt excessively dark due to the small windows and unnecessarily low ceilings.

“It was kind of a Franken-house,” Jamie recalls. “You had original portions from the ’40s, and you had remodels that took place in the ’70s. You had every era of furniture—every kind of kitschy item that you would ever see in a beach house. It was cozy, and it certainly had a lot of warm memories—but it just wasn’t functional in the way we wanted to live, and in the way you would think about a 21st-century home. There was not a lot of natural light, so it was very dark. Even though you could look out the windows and see the ocean, you didn’t ever feel like there was a seamless connection between the two things.”

Before: Kitchen

After: Kitchen

Then there was the more urgent maintenance need: the leaking roof. Recalling a January 2020 stay at the cabin, Jamie says: “I’d gone on maybe the seventh trip to the hardware store trying to plug a leak, and I thought to myself, ‘This is ridiculous. We need to get a new roof.’”

Extended family members—like Cleo’s uncle, who lived in a cabin just down the street—encouraged the couple to think bigger, so they reached out to Portland architect Webster Wilson, who had already renovated two other Neskowin houses, including an acclaimed Van Evera Bailey home just down the street. Wilson had also spent much of his life visiting his own family’s beach house at Neskowin; he was actually a neighbor.

Before: Bedroom

After: Bedroom

Touring the existing house with Jamie and Cleo, Wilson saw possibility from the start.

“It’s built up onto this large sand dune, so it was unbeatable for sight lines and views and access to the beach,” the architect recalls. “The wetland to the east is beautiful, too. But neither view was being truly captured in the original house, and there was no connection to the wetland at all. The windows were these smaller punched openings, with no floor-to-ceiling glass facing the beach. It was clear that some of the original house had been kind of covered up, so there was a real opportunity to connect the view while opening up the original roofline to bring those spaces back to the original.”

Before: Rear Facade

After: Rear Facade

First, though, came an even more pressing need: the foundation. “The existing slab was cracking right in the middle, because it was sloping toward the ocean on one side and toward the wetlands to the other,” Wilson says. New footings were dug deep below the repaired foundation, giving it added seismic resilience.

“It certainly is a tricky place to build, and you have to live there with the anxiety about a tsunami or even just a really bad storm,” he says. “It’s not for the faint of heart, I guess. But in that precariousness is also the beauty, right? You’re right there on the beach, and you can see all this beautiful wildlife—there’s elk in the swamp, there’s bald eagles. You can see whale spouts out in the ocean. It’s a beautiful place to be.”

Wilson’s redesign began by rearranging rooms. While the existing ocean-facing living and dining area stayed in place, he moved the kitchen from the northeast to the southeast corner of the house.

Both the kitchen and master bedroom feel more spacious with their low ceilings removed, which exposed the slope of the house. And the kitchen now lines up directly with the living and dining areas. Windows now stretch all the way around this southeast corner of the house, continuing with a glass backsplash beneath the new vertical-grain Douglas fir cabinets.

Before: Dining Area

“Now that the kitchen opens up to the back corner of the house, you can look out to the wetlands and marsh, and the Coast Range mountains beyond that,” Cleo says. “Then you turn around and there’s the ocean in the other direction. I really love that contrast.”

Along the ocean-facing side of the house, beside the living and dining spaces, a wall of glass that creates a whole new relationship with the tree-covered dunes in the foreground, as well as the beach and ocean view just beyond. A new cabinet in the living room fireplace wall hides the TV while improving circulation. Both here and in the kitchen, some of the upper glass panels are operable, for naturally ventilation.

After: Dining Area

The renovated primary bedroom is an experience unto itself, with a large window seat clad in more of the re-milled original cedar. The window perfectly frames the view of a shore pine a few feet beyond the wall of the house.

“That tree is really important for that bay window view,” Wilson explains. “It’s almost like a Hiroshige woodblock print. I heard a suggestion of actually cutting down the tree, but luckily Jamie and Cleo were like, ‘Absolutely no way.’”

In fact, each of the primary redesigned spaces—living/dining room, kitchen and primary bedroom—frames a different part of the landscape. “The living room is maximizes the ocean view in the distance,” Wilson says. “The primary bedroom has this carefully framed, up-close view of the dune-scape and tree. And the kitchen celebrates that beautiful wetland and coast range.”

For all its new glass, the interior is still festooned in wood—the design team re-milled the home’s original wood panels in the hallways and the old primary bedroom and installed them in the living room. “They were these beautiful one-by-six cedar panels, but they had taken a lot of UV degradation,” Wilson recalls, “Once we re-planed them and cleaned them all up, they became this wonderful vestige of the original house.”

Wilson enlarged an existing bathroom to form the primary suite, and created a second bathroom at the back of the house, where a laundry room had been, next to the kids’ bedrooms. Both bathrooms are clad in colorful ceramic tiles, in complementary teal and blue, which echo the gray ceramic flooring in the public areas.

After: Bathroom

The family was wowed by the renovation, with its clean-lined simplicity and its glass-ensconced connections to the landscape, although after moving back in, Jamie and Cleo realized one final piece was missing.

“We got some of the old pictures that used to be hanging on the walls and re-hung them,” Jamie recalls with a chuckle. They weren’t necessarily the couple’s style, but the paintings of old boats, a nutcracker figurine, and clipper ship model added a touch of whimsy. “It just started feeling more and more like home,” he says.

Despite the transformation, Cleo and Jaime say the house retains its essence. “Our neighbor’s house used to be exactly the same design, but they added a second story—next to that, our house looks so little,” Cleo says. “But Jamie always describes this as a precious jewel box, and I like that. We’re lucky that it was relatively untouched for so many decades, and that we had so much of the original 1940s architecture to work with. It didn’t go through some terrible 1990s makeover.”

“We’d never have been able to talk to my mom again if we’d done something different,” Jamie says with a laugh—and thankfully, the reverse has proven true for this renovated Neskowin cottage. “Actually, a lot of family are all of a sudden interested in using it.”

More Before & After stories:

A Couple Crack Open a Cramped Brick House on a Washington Oyster Farm

A Renovation Saves a Portland Home From Shag Carpet and Pink Linoleum

Project Credits:

Architect of Record: Webster Wilson Architect

Builder: Cellar Ridge Construction

Structural Engineer: Madden & Baughman