Faced with unforgiving footprint, architects serve up haven for hosting for Seattle restauranteur

When Quynh-Vy Pham inherited the house, it was unfinished.

Fluffy, pink insulation poked out of the walls and between the ceiling planks. Wiring hung from the ceiling, wall studs were exposed, and drywall was left ragged.

Pham’s brother, Khoa, had purchased the slight structure earlier in the decade — it was right around the corner from his family’s 40-year-old restaurant, Phở Bắc. He began renovating the property by hand, but he suffered a heart attack and died in 2021, leaving his sister with a house-in-progress.

It was also a house that had cycled through several identities over the decades: Built in 1927, it belonged to the Morans, a prominent family in the city. Eventually, the squat outbuilding became an art studio for the family’s daughter, Louise Crow, today heralded as Seattle’s first impressionist painter, but the family eventually split the lot, selling the building on its own. In the 1940s, the Baptist Church bought the building, held on to it for a few decades, and then sold it to Khoa.

At that point, the ramshackle structure sat sandwiched between two large homes in Seattle’s Leschi neighborhood. The building was modest but known: Perched on a hill, the house had a prominent north face punctuated with a sizeable window wall.

“It’s always been kind of a distinctive structure,” said Rebecca Marsh, a project architect at Shed. The locally headquartered architecture firm actually counted the house as a neighbor — one of Shed’s co-founding principals, Prentice Hale, often passed it on his way to the office and considered making an offer on the property when the church listed it for sale.

Instead, Marsh recalled, Pham called Shed once she was ready to move forward with the project. The gist was, “We’re in the neighborhood. I like your work,” Marsh said. “Let’s meet.”

That meeting rolled into a meaningful project for Pham and Shed alike.

“It became a very important project in the office emotionally, as well as important for us as a neighborhood,” Marsh explained. Shed’s office was right across the street from Phở Bắc, which Pham runs with her sister, Yenvy, and a short walk away from the project. Shed’s team wanted to create something that Pham would love and that would do the firm proud.

“We wanted to carry on the legacy of the building,” Marsh said, picking out a historical throughline. Once a creative shelter for Seattle’s first female impressionist painter, it now belonged to “Quynh-Vy, who is a super badass female Vietnamese entrepreneur.”

The design team started with what they had on the site: an existing, nonconforming structure. It wasn’t historically protected, but there was the building’s legacy to consider, a legacy that now encompasses the work Khoa completed before his passing. Knocking it down would also force Shed to build something that conformed to modern setbacks, raising the specter of an even smaller footprint. So, for sentimental reasons as much as practical ones, Shed’s team preserved as much of the original building as they could.

Paired with site conditions, that impetus to keep part of the existing structure drove a lot of the design decisions, Marsh said, resulting in “the kind of unique structure of the house.”

Despite its straightforward square front, the house is narrow and long. It sticks up in the back while its roof slopes toward the east; the design team couldn’t build the east wall to meet the tall, existing western wall due to modern setbacks. But that gives it some interest.

“Ultimately, it became a better project than if it just became one big, extruded box, I think,” Marsh said.

From the outside, the home is whimsical. Its charcoal shingles and powder-pink front window frames — both color choices Khoa made — recall the interior design of Pham’s restaurants.

But when it came to the interior, Pham wanted a home that felt light and airy, with flexible space for cooking and hosting. The restaurateur doesn’t just work with food in her professional life, “she hosts a lot,” Marsh detailed. “She always has people over every time we go by.”

That meant she wanted a flowing lower floor — where guests could seamlessly float between the kitchen, rear yard and other social spaces — and a compact set of private space on the upper floor: Pham’s bedroom, a guest room-office space and a shared bathroom.

Even with a compact floor plan, Pham wanted her rooms to feel distinct, something that worked well with the home’s variable roofline. The living room has 14-foot ceilings, but those got clipped down in the dining room as the roof tilts east. In the kitchen, the ceiling shoots back up, giving the narrow room some airiness.

Alongside structural elements, Shed kept original details such as a pendant light (original to the building’s church era) hanging in the living space and the large front window (original to the building itself). While the window was outdated — Shed swapped it out for something more energy efficient — they brought it inside and replaced its glass with textured panes, using the window as a guardrail and translucent wall for the main staircase. Khoa had installed the exposed framing near what became the dining room, so that detail remained nestled into the ceiling.

“The big move was preserving what we can and then using that to actually create more dynamic space on the interior.”

When said and done, the project cost less than $170,000, and kicked off a somewhat unusual client-architect relationship.

“Quynh-Vy hosted our Christmas party that year after the project was done,” Marsh said. “That is a definite first, that she was willing to have 14 architects hang out in her house and have dinner with her.”

It was important for the firm to see the project, Marsh explained. Usually, a project ends, and the architects leave. They don’t always get to see how the space gets lived in and weathers its use. Seeing a home in action is meaningful.

Because Shed is so close to Pham’s home, the architects still see it in action from time to time.

“You walk by Quynh-Vy’s, and you can hear her laughing in the backyard or, like, see a bunch of cars out front and they’re working on, you know, ideas for their restaurant and things,” Marsh said. “So, it’s pretty special.”