Could be (at least partly) thanks to the perch itself.
When he’s not in Spokane, Wash. (Jackson is semiretired from Coeur d’Alene’s Sunshine Minting, Inc. — “making money making money”), Jackson drops anchor at the tippy top of Union Harbor, an apartment-turned-condominium building erected quite literally on the lake in 1968. Jackson and his wife, Ruth Gellert Jackson, inherited the two-level corner condo from her father, philanthropist and ELDEC CEO Max Gellert, after his death in 2012. Ruth passed away in October 2014 — after the condo’s total makeover had begun, but more than a year before its completion.
“My wife and I had always planned to update the condo and move here when we retired,” Jackson says. “We were going to do a little bit here, a little bit there … let’s just say the scope changed.”
Jackson says it was pretty obvious pretty quickly they needed an architect to open up the 2,375-square-foot space as much as possible and “to do whatever needed done to accent this fabulous view.”
Ben Trogdon got that the second he walked in the fourth-floor door, at the end of a deceptively blasé long, narrow, fluorescent-y hallway.
“The location is so stunning; it’s just a jaw-dropper,” says the namesake architect of Ben Trogdon Architects. “The view is the most important. This is a one-of-a-kind building. The height on the top floor doesn’t exist anywhere else on the east side of Lake Union.”
Not much was untouched in this visionary view quest. The original two-story windows stayed, but walls came down. Rooms moved and assumed new roles (the dining room, now with twice the window space, used to be a walled-off bedroom; the pantry used to be a galley kitchen; the all-new non-galley kitchen used to be the dining room). The dated brick-faced fireplace lost one of its two flues and gained stained rift-sawn oak and “harder-than-nails” painted MDF panels. Trogdon answered the “Where are we going to put the TV?” question with a soffit box that holds a drop-down big-screen TV; once it drops down, it rotates 360 degrees.
Upstairs, the “unused and inefficient” whole-floor open loft evolved into a practical and view-perfect media room, bathroom and bedroom (where three glass panels overlooking the living area slide for acoustic privacy without blocking the lakescape).
Throughout, interior designer Sally Oien (The Oien Collaborative) worked with sandy-beach and driftwood references, and restrained “organic Pacific Northwest natural colorations,” on all-new furniture. Inspired by one of Jackson’s multicolored Hawaiian shirts, a few deliberately not-so-restrained injections of bright orange pop out to say HEY: on the entryway electrical box, on a towering post, on a lone dish towel in the sparkling kitchen.
The new open stairway showcases ingenuity on a couple of levels: in the structure holding up its heavyweight steel panels — and in the way those panels were delivered. They wouldn’t fit up the building’s stairs (or in the elevators), so a hired barge with a crane “puttered right up and parked,” Trogdon says, and hoisted them (along with the refrigerator and a new rooftop air-conditioning unit) up to the deck.
Outside and in, every room now accents that forever view, and the lasting Gellert legacy, thanks in huge part, Jackson says, to “godsend” CiCi Pilgrim, who stepped in to help with the project after her sister Ruth’s death.
“So much of what was in Ruth’s mind had to do with her dad,” Jackson says. “So a lot of this is CiCi’s vision of what was Ruth’s vision.”
So the first-level master bathroom, expanded by stealing a little space from the entry, showcases the glass blocks Ruth really wanted, along with granite countertops that reminded the Jacksons of Palouse wheat fields, and at the top of the stairs hang five black-and-white Seattle Opera “Madame Butterfly” photos discovered in Max Gellert’s portfolios. (“He was a tremendous supporter,” Trogdon says.)
And that view — did we mention the view? — that view is a treasured heirloom, too.
“It’s spectacular,” Jackson says. “I could just stay here forever and stare out the windows.”
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