Call him aspirational, but owning waterfront property had been a goal for Gary Vowels since he was a child.
His parents purchased a resort on Diamond Lake in Eastern Washington about the time he was in sixth grade. He spent two years there and decided that, one day, he wanted to buy a house on the water. He made it one of his life’s objectives.
Decades later, in the 1990s, Vowels finally had the means to fulfill his dream. An Internet start-up he launched was doing well, and a lot had opened up on Camano Island. He scooped up the site, building a beach home that was featured in Better Homes and Gardens in 2001.
This Saturday, the public can see Vowels’ dream home, along with four others, on Camano Island’s 30th Annual Home Tour.
“I just think it’s a good thing to do,” Vowels, now 67, said of taking part in the home tour. “I think it’s fun to participate.”
While the tour features several plum homes, Vowels’ is a clear gem. As you approach the property, a concrete path leads up to the house, taking a short jog past a neatly landscaped yard and through an archway covered with greenery. Outside the front door, a seating area is separated from the yard by a low river-rock wall.
“These are almost like outdoor rooms,” lead architect Dan Nelson of Designs Northwest Architects said. “There’s this sense of the space that you pass through. A lot of our designs will have courtyards. I call them vignettes of space.”
Inside, the layout is marked by openness. Rooms bleed together, ceilings have exposed beams and screened skylights let in both air and light.
Two particular rooms showcase the home’s open atmosphere. First, there’s the main room, which actually combines three rooms. It has a seating area — a couch, chairs — in front of a towering river-rock fireplace, a small dining area off to one corner, and a kitchen with loads of counter space and bar-chair seating.
“It makes it easy to interact with other people when you’re preparing meals and eating and watching TV and so forth,” Vowels said. “Everyone can see everyone else.”
The other room is, oddly enough, the master bedroom and bathroom. There, a bathtub with water jets and a shower with a glass door sit near the doorway; they are part of the room, as much as a desk or a bed might be.
Sometimes Vowels likes to draw open the shades overlooking Port Susan, fix a drink, run a bath and just “let the world go by.”
Granted, that’s mainly on weekends. Vowels still lives and works weekdays in Redmond, but he may set up an office space in the Camano Island home soon so he can work from the water in the coming years.
And can you blame him? The home touts fine attention to detail that appeals to Vowels. Starfish rest on top of a window frame in the kitchen, for instance, and the pine floors, shipped in from Georgia, are held together using pegs instead of nails. It’s a relaxed environment with a minutely tuned sense of design.
Vowels said that during construction, whenever he was faced with a choice between two price levels, he chose the more expensive option. The result is clear.
“It’s built like a tank,” he said. “Very solid. Both in the floor, the walls, the ceiling. All the structure is very, very strong. We did that with the thought that there would be intense storms.”
The storms have yet to damage his home, he said. Instead, those raging winds simply offer entertainment.
“I like, I guess, the living room the best, with a big fire going and a storm going on outside, sitting there, watching the fire and watching the weather,” he said.
And on Saturday, visitors can simply get a look at the home itself, which could prove as interesting as any storm.
Reporter Andy Rathbun: 425-339-3455 or e-mail arathbun@heraldnet.com.
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