Dan Nelson remembers wandering as a teen through the homes his uncle was building and thinking, “Wow.”
It was the ’60s and Uncle Franny Nelson was designing and building homes in the contemporary Northwest style: lots of natural materials, open wood framing and rough-sawn timbers. It was the first time Nelson had seen exposed aggregate concrete used in a residential house.
Today Dan Nelson is the principal architect at the Stanwood firm Designs Northwest Architects. While many experiences have shaped his work, he believes it’s his uncle, also a serious painter, who ultimately awakened his creativity.
“You don’t just turn it on and off,” said Nelson, a local who grew up in a Craftsman home and graduated from Everett High School in 1971. “It’s part of your whole lifestyle.”
He and his firm have worked on commercial and public projects, such as the Camano Island gateway and the Camano Island Senior Center. The majority of the firm’s projects are residential.
“I always tell my clients whenever I start, my goal is to design the house for them,” he said. “I’m not designing the house for me. This is not a monument to my architecture.”
And if Nelson keeps the clients’ lifestyle in mind as he designs, “the architecture will come.”
That said, some commonalities run through his work. He prefers natural materials and his work has a constructional edge — it’s possible to see how the parts fit together, for instance, as with exposed galvanized metal connectors. He works to create spaces that are light and airy. His homes meld with their sites. He often uses covered porches, arbors, screens and courtyards to make the transition from indoors to outdoors.
Whenever possible, he strives to link the contemporary to the traditional. Many of the homes he has designed on Camano Island show traces of the shingle-style homes he was exposed to while working in New England, but these are contemporary homes at their core with features that fit a modern lifestyle.
“Our houses are classic, timeless,” he said. “We try not to be trendy in terms of the architecture.”
The Camano Island home photographed here, owned by Ian and Linda Gleadle, is a second home for the couple.
Dan Wickstrom built the home, which was featured in Better Homes and Gardens.
Its exterior is reminiscent of a shingle-style home but with a contemporary twist. The interior is designed along a spine with the master bedroom on one end of the single-level, three-bedroom home and the kids’ rooms on the other. A great room opens to a covered porch with a hot tub. And because this is a beach house, a side entry with an outdoor shower leads into a mudroom. The firm worked closely with H2K interior designers to coordinate interior finishes, materials and the kitchen and bath layouts.
Reporter Debra Smith: 425-339-3197 or dsmith@heraldnet.com
Dan Nelson
Firm: Designs Northwest Architects, 10031 Highway 532, Suite B, Stanwood; 360-629-3441; www.designsnw.com. Nelson is the principal architect at the 11-person firm, which offers a range of services, including architectural, landscape and interior design.
Education: Bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Pacific Lutheran University, bachelor’s degree from the Boston Architectural Center and a master’s degree in architecture from Columbia University.
Age: 54
Influences: A tour overseas in his youth that introduced him to a vibrant European urbanism; New England architecture, particularly shingle-style homes; modern architects Richard Meier, Le Corbusier and Alvar Aalto; and the work of respected Northwest architects such as Olson, Sundberg, Kundig and Allen, who create work that relates to the environment, blends with the site and uses simple, natural materials. Perhaps the greatest influence on Nelson was his uncle, Franny Nelson, a designer, builder and fine artist based in Everett who built a number of Northwest contemporary homes in Mukilteo.
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