D rive past Steph Lestat’s 1912 cottage on Avenue J in Snohomish and you’d hardly blink.
The home is tidy and quaint, with its shingled siding and trimmed lawn, but not extraordinary.
Step inside, however, and prepare to be wowed.
Lestat, an artist with a penchant for science fiction and art deco, transformed the interior to suit his eclectic interests.
The kitchen is all bold colors, stainless steel and his sci-fi-inspired art. What was once a bedroom is now a home theater, complete with red velvet curtains, wall-sized screen and a 1920s speaker that encloses the surround-sound equipment.
The room all the guests must see, though, is the bathroom.
It’s tiny and tucked away at the back of the house, an afterthought to this early 1900s house. When Lestat bought the home, it was “bare walls, white, with a broken toilet.”
He got right to work, painting the yellow linoleum black, replacing the toilet, and adding sheets of galvanized steel and copper to the plywood vanity. On the walls went collages of cut metal and working antique gauges and gadgets. Lestat, wearing black-rimmed glasses, goatee and a beret, twists the knob on what used to be an antique oven timer, and it winds down to a shriek.
“I was thinking Jules Verne,” he said, referring to the author of “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” “I wanted a feeling of a control room in a submarine or a ship.”
He mounted two diamond-plated steel toolboxes on the wall as medicine cabinets. A shimmering metallic-looking shower curtain finishes off the look of Lestat’s own Nautilus.
Surveying his creation, he said: “I get to do things I never was able to as a child.”
Reporter Debra Smith: 425-339-3197 or dsmith@heraldnet.com.
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