When architect Paul Wanzer and his wife, Mary, thought about downsizing, they weren't just looking for a small home; they sought a lifestyle shift.
The couple had owned a home and raised their family on Washington’s Mercer Island, but now that the kids were out of the house, they wanted to return to the city.
Their search brought them to Seattle’s Portage Bay.
“We thought that we would be in a walkable neighborhood or on the waterfront,” said Wanzer, principal at local firm Hoshide Wanzer Architects. Embracing both options didn’t seem possible until Wanzer’s brother (the owner of a floating home) spotted a certain property for sale on his street. It was an aging floating home on the canal that separates Lake Union from Lake Washington.
The Wanzers jumped at the opportunity, embracing a confluence of opportunity and the intriguing “romance of it all,” Wanzer said.
Watch the Homes.com Learning video on the pros and cons of floating homes
It's like building a regular house but 'slower and more precise'
To start, Wanzer hired Dyna Builders, a Seattle-based firm well-versed in Seattle’s world of floating homes.
The firm began constructing floating homes around 2009, recalled Dyna founder and president Ren Chandler, learning as they went. But once Dyna had a first project under its belt and the “pretty steep” learning curve crested, building even more floating homes made sense. Today, custom floating homes like Wanzer’s make up about 20% of Dyna’s work.
“It’s very different from regular construction, even though we are essentially just building a house,” Chandler said. “You can’t use a level, you can’t use a laser, everything is much smaller and tighter and contained.”
For the Wanzers’ project, Dyna began with demolition: The existing home dated to the early 20th century and “was pretty rough,” Wanzer said. Plus, Seattle law, which caps the number of floating homes, makes preserving elements of an existing one difficult. You must demolish a floating home to build a new one, Wanzer and Chandler said.
“They don’t want them showing up [in] some other location unpermitted, so they require you to demolish them and videotape the demolition and everything,” Wanzer explained. “It’s too bad, because a lot of that needs to go into the landfill.”
The requirement, which also apparently prevents builders from shipping the unwanted homes elsewhere (there’s a market for them in Canada, apparently), is “a sore subject,” Chandler said. “It would be nice to reuse these homes rather than just putting them in the landfill."
Dyna and Wanzer worked with salvage groups to save what they could, including the old-growth wood float that had supported the existing structure for roughly a century.
Building then took place in Dyna’s construction shipyard, and, once completed, the home was towed to its watery lot. As with a home on dry land, Dyna started with the foundation, installing a 250,000-pound concrete float through a process that takes one land-bound crane and one in the water.
“We call it ‘crane day,’” Chandler said. “It’s a massive undertaking.”
The float itself is essential: It’s the home’s foundation, and it spends its life bobbing in Seattle’s brackish water. “It’s a waterproof mix of concrete,” Chandler said, “the same that they would use in a floating bridge.”
Another layer of waterproofing — this time a fluid-applied membrane — also gets put inside the float, similarly to a liner in a pickup. The liner is redundant, but in the event of a crack in the concrete, it means that floating homeowners just need to repair the hole, not worry about their foundation flooding.
From there “we’re just building a regular house, but it’s, you know, kind of slower and more precise,” Chandler said.
“And it moves around constantly,” Wanzer added.
There's a strong connection to the water
With the float installed, Dyna got to work realizing Wanzer’s design: a rectangular, two-story home wrapped in clerestory windows.
Wanzer designed his brother’s floating home, so he and his wife had a clear idea of their needs.
“We wanted a one-bedroom home,” Wanzer said. “We wanted a roof deck, and we wanted easy living.”
Although some floating homes flip the script and put the private areas at the bottom, the Wanzers placed their living areas on the water level, orienting the entry, library, dining space, and kitchen along the compact footprint. The layout achieved a “strong connection to the water” bolstered by ample water-level windows, Wanzer said. “We’re basically a glass house on the lower level.”
They did, however, install sliding shutters that can offer privacy as needed, preventing “a fishbowl effect” as canal traffic passes, Chandler said. If the Wanzers want “to be out there and part of all the boats going by, [they] can be,” he continued, “but having the ability to be private as well, that makes a really big difference.”
For the roof deck, Wanzer designed a “vegetated roof” along the perimeter. “It’s nice to have just natural materials up there. Stuff growing around you instead of being all in pots, is, I think, a very compelling thing.”
The home itself is 1,780 square feet with an 820-square-foot deck, so that meant pretty much every room had to be designed to maximize space and storage, Wanzer said. Wall and floor systems got shaved down wherever possible so the design could “squeak out another little closet or another little shelf … because you know you’re going to need that.”
When it came to materials, the Wanzers kept things straightforward. White oak floors warmed by radiant heat and white teak millwork brighten the interior and nod to nautical design, softening a project with lots of steel and glass.
These materials are easy to maintain and useful in mitigating a struggle many floating homes face.
“One of the things that we deal with that you typically don’t in a regular house is spiders,” Chandler said.
It’s a design concern, Wanzer emphasized. “We look at siding materials and stuff as where there are places for spiders to build nests.”
But it’s an “almost futile task,” he said. “They always find ways.”
It's a minor inconvenience for a front-row seat on the waves.
