House Of Patterns -- Christopher Alexander's Solid Reasoning Went Into This Home That Makes Sense Comfortably

The path to Ann Medlock and John Graham's Whidbey Island home is paved with giraffes - both literally and figuratively.

Medlock and Graham are founder/president and executive director, respectively, of the Giraffe Project, a nonprofit organization that generates public recognition for individuals who "stick their necks out" for the common good. Until recently, the couple ran the organization from their home, and used cut-out giraffes to guide visitors along the winding dirt road to their door.

After building this home, Medlock and Graham should qualify for one of their own Giraffe Project citations. The six-year ordeal saw the husband and wife risk financial ruin for the sake of a cause they believe in.

That cause is better housing. And the leader they champion is named Christopher Alexander.

Unknown to the public at large, but revered by legions of architects, designers and laymen around the world, Alexander is the author or co-author of more than a half dozen books on architecture and design theory. In his most famous work, a 1977 epic entitled "A Pattern Language" (now in its 14th printing), the Berkeley, Calif., architect spells out 253 "patterns" for producing better neighborhoods and houses. Among the suggestions are calls for limiting the size of communities, retaining farmland instead of building parks, creating houses with seating alcoves, multipane windows and varied ceiling heights, and hundreds of other guidelines

designed to make homes more hospitable.

In the end, Alexander's book is not about aesthetics, but about creating housing that places psychic and spiritual shelter above mere fashion.

Until recently, Alexander, 47, was better known as a theorist than a practicing architect. When Medlock and Graham first contacted him seven years ago, the architect had built only one house in this country, besides his own. Sheepishly, the couple asked if he would care to design another. To their astonishment, he said yes.

Given Alexander's reputation, the resulting house appears quite unassuming at first glance. On the crest of a forested knoll, with land falling off on three sides, the 2,700-square-foot structure looks like nothing so much as a rustic lodge, with horizontal cedar siding broken up by surface-mounted battens. Passing beneath a gaping archway, one enters a clearing framed by the home's two wings. Small windows, trimmed in green, hug the underside of the eaves, while larger windows line the ground floor below. A protruding porch shelters what appears to be the front door, although most visitors enter through the doorway beneath the arch.

As one steps inside, the home simply feels solid, and for good reason. At Alexander's instruction, the builders, Dow Construction of Seattle, used 2-by-10 framing, making the walls and doorways thick, and heightening the sense of passage between exterior and interior. Some of the inside doors are framed with bookcases, making the walls appear even thicker. To Alexander's way of thinking, thick walls and deep sills instill a sense of comfort and security in a home's occupants.

"You can't see most of the money that went in here," says Medlock, "but you can feel the strength it bought."

All the cabinetry in the home - even the placement of the refrigerator - was worked out by the architect on the site, using cardboard models to simulate the final product. "Everything you see in this house was built in cardboard at least three times before it was built in wood," says Medlock. "We bought a truckload of white cardboard every time Chris came."

When it was time to frame the windows, Alexander stretched sheets of paper across the wall and cut holes until he got the size and placement that pleased him.

The owners admit it was a terrifying way to work. "I never saw any blueprint," says Graham. "I don't think they existed."

Nevertheless, Medlock defends Alexander's style. "If you can't do that kind of dinkering with it, you haven't got a live thing. You've just got something that technically worked on a piece of paper. You don't have this JUICE that comes from finding out that something really ought to be three inches higher."

The house has been laid out in a succession of rooms, which the architect likens to "a necklace of beads." Because Graham wanted a house that felt as sturdy and rough-hewn as an old pair of cowboy boots, Alexander specified fir floors, and covered the wainscoting and ceilings with humble exterior-grade plywood. The wood's crude, textured finish has been softened with rich shades of red, green and blue paint. The results recall the colorful country home of turn-of-the-century Swedish artist Carl Larsson.

The dark front hall leads to the sun-filled kitchen, in keeping with Alexander's belief in alternating areas of light and dark. The kitchen's yellow ceiling is illuminated by curly-topped light fixtures that a creative house guest fabricated from old olive-oil cans. The cabinets feature cedar frames and faces milled from a juniper tree that the cabinetmaker fished out of Puget Sound. The fir used on the drawer fronts was similarly obtained. The red tile countertops were custom-made for the home, and embellished by Medlock with fingerprints, quotations, and impressions made from her earrings. "They looked too neat," she explains, "so I took off all the jewelry I had on and started attacking them."

The same tile company, Aruba, produced the scenic mural behind the sink, so Graham would have something to inspire him while he washed dishes. The owners didn't want a dishwasher; a heat lamp mounted over a wooden dish rack hastens drying.

Unable to talk Graham out of a separate dining room, Alexander designed a generous nook alongside the kitchen, and filled it with a wraparound banquette and rolling table. In a bold move, the architect extended part of the front porch across the dining-room window, blocking some of the view. By defying expectations of neatness and symmetry, the gesture makes the house feel less studied and more informal.

A friend of the owners created a colorful masonite mosaic of a compass for the floor of the foyer next door, and inscribed the light fixture above it with a map of the Pleiades. Old mica gondolier lights hang on either side of the stairway to the second floor.

A red velvet curtain frames the doorway to the living room, a captivating space marked by tall, narrow windows, wide crown moldings, and shelves crowded with books. Medlock and Graham have furnished the room with the flotsam and jetsam of their peripatetic lives. Windowsills and bookcases are cluttered with African artifacts collected during the owners' years abroad. (Graham once served as Andrew Young's assistant at the United Nations) A dog-eared set of Alexander's writings rest atop a skirted side table. A deck chair from a British steamship sits on a worn Oriental carpet, which Medlock discovered in the corner of a friend's garage just weeks after seeing the very same rug in a dream. She had never visited the house before.

Like the rug, most of the furnishings in the room are just past their prime - another Alexander dictum. The architect considers threadbare corners and loose springs as welcoming and forgiving as old friends, and far preferable to going out and buying everything new.

"A Pattern Language" encourages "rooms within rooms" - small, cozy spaces that create a sense of shelter within the larger space. The far end of the living room, for instance, is given over to a shallow alcove containing a window seat large enough for intimate conversations, but small enough to share with just a book. In the master bedroom, the effect is even more disarming. The front half of the room features an office on one side and a bench bordered by bookcases on the other. A green velvet portiere opens to reveal a tiny sleeping area with blue wainscoting, pink walls, and a postage-stamp deck. The total effect is cozy, but never precious - reminiscent of an older home built in the days before master suites and walk-in closets.

Although the house is attracting a great deal of attention (it was recently published in Progressive Architecture magazine, and is scheduled to appear in House and Garden early next year), it almost didn't get finished. Two-thirds of the way through construction, Medlock and Graham ran out of money. Although they'd managed to fund that much of the project with the proceeds from the sale of Medlock's New York co-op, no bank was willing to pick up the balance. They tried 13 lenders, finally hitting paydirt on the 14th. Even the builder took out a note to help finance construction.

"By the time this house was finished, absolutely every line of credit was used up," recalls Graham. "Every credit card was used up. At one point, we had to get a quick check from Anne's parents in South Carolina to buy groceries for the week. We had a wonderful house, but we couldn't buy the groceries."

The house would never have gotten built at all were it not for the help of friends and strangers who believed in what Alexander, Medlock and Graham were trying to accomplish. There's the Oregon friend who made the compass on the hall floor, and the two carpenters she ran into at a Portland coffeeshop who were so taken with her description of the project that they hopped in her car right then and there, and spent the next five days on Whidbey laying floors - free of charge.

"An awful lot of people have just dropped out of the sky and said, `I heard you were building an Alexander house. What can I do?' " explains Medlock. "That book really has an enormous effect on people."

Unfortunately, clients and architect didn't always see eye-to-eye on every issue. The trio nearly parted company on several occasions, culminating in a year-long dispute over interior and exterior colors. At one point, Alexander insisted that the house be painted peach. Graham refused, saying it would make the place look like a Swedish suburb. Only after the owners flew to Berkeley were the three able to strike a compromise. The peach paint went.

A few months later, Alexander flew up to inspect the completed finishes. When Medlock and Graham showed up an hour and a half later, he met them at the door and said, "It's absolutely beautiful."

Medlock smiles as she recalls the moment. "It was just the epiphany of all the years of struggling with Chris," she says.

Medlock and Graham don't consider their mission complete just yet. They want their home to be a melting pot of artists, writers and thinkers - a place where new ideas can be nurtured and shared. They also want to spread Alexander's gospel by holding periodic open houses where the public can see the architect's teachings at work.

"I would never have gone through what we've gone through just to create a comfy place for John and Ann to live. That's too trivial," says Medlock, fervently. "I'm an endless crusader of `A Pattern Language.' It is a sane-making way to build."

For information on open houses, contact Ann Medlock at the Giraffe Project, 1-221-7989.

SEATTLE WRITER FRED ALBERT REPORTS REGULARLY ON HOME DESIGN FOR PACIFIC, AND IS CO-AUTHOR OF "AMERICAN DESIGN: THE NORTHWEST," PUBLISHED BY BANTAM. GREG GILBERT IS A SEATTLE TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER.