Where'd You Go, Bernadette(6)
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From: Manjula Kapoor
To: Bernadette Fox
Dear Ms. Fox,
I have received your instructions regarding the packing list and will proceed accordingly. What is manse? I do not find it in any of my records.
Warm regards,
Manjula
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From: Bernadette Fox
To: Manjula Kapoor
You know what it’s like when you go to Ikea and you can’t believe how cheap everything is, and even though you may not need a hundred tea lights, my God, they’re only ninety-nine cents for the whole bag? Or: Sure, the throw pillows are filled with a squishy ball of no-doubt toxic whatnot, but they’re so bright and three-for-five-dollars that before you know it you’ve dropped five hundred bucks, not because you needed any of this crap, but because it was so damn cheap?
Of course you don’t. But if you did, you’d know what Seattle real estate was like for me.
I came up here on a whim, pretty much. We’d been living in L.A. when Elgie’s animation company was bought by Big Brother. Whoops, did I say Big Brother? I meant Microsoft. Around the same time, I’d had a Huge Hideous Thing happen to me (which we definitely do not need to get into). Let’s just say that it was so huge and so hideous that it made me want to flee L.A. and never return.
Even though Elgie didn’t need to relocate to Seattle, Big Brother strongly recommended it. I was more than happy to use it as an excuse to hightail it out of La-La Land.
My first trip up here, to Seattle, the realtor picked me up at the airport to look at houses. The morning batch were all Craftsman, which is all they have here, if you don’t count the rash of view-busting apartment buildings that appear in inexplicable clumps, as if the zoning chief was asleep at his desk during the sixties and seventies and turned architectural design over to the Soviets.
Everything else is Craftsman. Turn-of-the-century Craftsman, beautifully restored Craftsman, reinterpretation of Craftsman, needs-some-love Craftsman, modern take on Craftsman. It’s like a hypnotist put everyone from Seattle in a collective trance. You are getting sleepy, when you wake up you will want to live only in a Craftsman house, the year won’t matter to you, all that will matter is that the walls will be thick, the windows tiny, the rooms dark, the ceilings low, and it will be poorly situated on the lot.
The main thing about this cornucopia of Craftsmans: compared to L.A., they were Ikea-cheap!
Ryan, the realtor, took me to lunch downtown at a Tom Douglas restaurant. Tom Douglas is a local chef who has a dozen restaurants, each one better than the last. Eating at Lola—that coconut cream pie! that garlic spread!—made me believe I could actually be happy making a life for myself in this Canada-close sinkhole they call the Emerald City. I blame you, Tom Douglas!
After lunch, we headed to the realtor’s car for the afternoon rounds. Looming over downtown was a hill crammed with, say what, Craftsman houses. At the top of the hill, on the left, I could discern a brick building with a huge yard overlooking Elliott Bay.
“What’s that?” I asked Ryan.
“Straight Gate,” he said. “It was a Catholic school for wayward girls built at the turn of the century.”
“What is it now?” I said.
“Oh, it hasn’t been anything for years. Every so often some developer tries to convert it to condos.”
“So it’s for sale?”
“It was supposed to be converted into eight condos,” he said. Then, his eyes began to pirouette, sensing a sale. “The property is three whole acres, mostly flat. Plus, you own the entire hillside, which you can’t build on, but it does ensure privacy. Gatehouse—which is what the developers renamed it because Straight Gate seemed antigay—is about twelve thousand square feet, loaded with charm. There is some deferred maintenance, but we’re talking crown jewel.”
“How much are they asking?”
Ryan gave a dramatic pause. “Four hundred thousand.” He watched with satisfaction as my jaw dropped. The other houses we’d seen were the same price, and they were on tiny lots.
Turns out the huge yard had been deeded to open space for tax purposes, and the Queen Anne Neighborhood Association had designated Straight Gate a historic site, which made it impossible to touch the exterior or interior walls. So the Straight Gate School for Girls was stuck in building-code limbo.
“But the area is zoned for single-family residences,” I said.
“Let’s take a look-see.” Ryan shoved me into his car.
In terms of layout, it was kind of brilliant. The basement—where the girls were penned, it appeared, from the dungeon door that locked from the outside—was certainly creepy and depressing. But it was five thousand square feet, which left seven thousand feet above-grade, a swell size for a house. On the ground floor was a kitchen opening onto a dining room—pretty fabulous—a huge receiving area that could be our living room, and a couple of small offices. On the second floor was a chapel with stained-glass windows and a row of confessionals. Perfect for a master bedroom and closet! The other rooms could be a kid’s room and a guest room. All that was required was cosmetic: weatherproofing, refinishing, paint. A cinch.
Standing on the back portico, facing west, I noticed ferry boats gliding like snails along the water.
“Where are they going?” I asked.
“Bainbridge Island.” Ryan answered. No dummy, he added, “Lots of people have second homes out there.”