Wall To Wall -- This Home Shows Off A Personal Collection

THE ONLY WAY MIKE SEIDL AND Debbie Ehrig can get into the basement of their Bainbridge Island home is by using the staircase outside the back door. The couple could have put one inside the house when they built it two years ago, but decided against it. A stairway would have used up too much wall space.

Walls are a precious commodity around the Seidl/Ehrig house. Avid art collectors, Seidl and Ehrig have reserved every available surface for their paintings, sculptures and glass works by some of the Northwest's most prominent artists.

Seidl, an architectural photographer, began amassing his collection in the late '70s, when he found himself sharing a Pioneer Square building with several dozen artists. He befriended several of them, began to photograph their work and, eventually, collect it.

"I feel like I have a personal relationship with each piece of art because I have a personal relationship with the artist," Seidl says.

When the couple decided to move to Bainbridge Island six years ago, they asked their old friend, architect Robert Maloney, to design a home to accommodate this collection. They also wanted a place with an open floor plan, lots of light and plenty of windows oriented toward the view.

"Those are sort of mutually exclusive goals," Seidl admits. "But Bob did a good job of making all those things priorities."

The home rises two stories above its hillside site and features a full daylight basement (still largely unfinished). Designed in a neo-Nantucket style, with gray shingles and white trim, the home's simple form is embellished with a covered entry and a wraparound deck topped with a trellis.

Maloney designed the home around a two-story atrium, located just off the entry hall. Gridded windows on one end flood the space with southern light and frame views of Rich Passage, while the upper sides of the atrium provide display space for art.

Since that is where they spend most of their time, the couple wanted the kitchen to be the focal point of the house. So Maloney placed the kitchen to one side of the atrium, and the dining room to the other side. Though neither is big, they appear larger because they borrow space from the atrium in the center.

A partition wall skewed at an impish angle divides the dining area from the adjoining living room. With two small children in the house, Seidl and Ehrig wanted the latter to accommodate family functions as well as guests. They placed a TV inside a pedimented cabinet (designed by artist Dutch Meyers) and furnished the room with squashy art-deco furniture. The vintage pieces are durable, but still presentable enough for guests, thanks to the elegant Jack Lenor Larsen damask that covers them.

One wall of the living room is given over to posters and lithos by the late New York artist Keith Haring. At the far end of the wall hangs a Haring original: a delicatessen bag (complete with grease stains) featuring a drawing of a pregnant woman and a glowing baby. Ehrig's sister ran into the artist on the street and asked him to do the picture for Ehrig, who was expecting her first child at the time.

More than anything else, Ehrig wanted the house to have a large laundry room. Maloney complied, creating a space just off the kitchen, where Ehrig can work on household projects and not worry about putting things away when company calls. The counters also double as serving space for large parties.

Having only rented apartments in the past, Seidl and Ehrig were anxious to live in a place where they could leave their own personal mark.

"When you own your own home, there aren't any rules," says Ehrig, a part-time dental hygienist. "We wanted to have some fun in this house."

The couple had admired the oriented strandboard floors at a downtown Seattle art gallery and, at Maloney's urging, decided to duplicate the effect in their home. For $200, they were able to buy enough of the bonded-wood-chip boards to cover 1,200 square feet of floor space. Then they talked their contractor, Ken Youch, into cutting the 4-by-8 sheets into 16-inch squares. (Youch was skeptical about the proposal, and compared the concept to wearing a tuxedo with dirty tennis shoes.) Seidl laid the tiles himself, then arduously sanded and stained them, finishing them off with three layers of polyurethane.

Despite the contractor's reservations, the resulting floor is extremely attractive, with a flecked gray-green finish that hides dirt and wears extremely well. "Our little daughter got tap shoes from Santa," says Ehrig. "She just taps her brains out on this, and it doesn't show anything!"

Interior designer Gail Fisher helped the couple choose the floor color, and assisted them in selecting the rest of the home's finishes, too. "They wanted some sort of backdrop that worked with this melange of art that they had," says Fisher.

The team chose pale gray walls and blue-gray berber carpeting for rooms without wood floors. Most trims and surfacing materials were kept simple. "We put our money into art, rather than expensive finishes," says Seidl, who ended up building the house for an economical $70 a square foot.

Despite the tight budget, the couple allowed themselves a few indulgences. Where possible, they tried to incorporate artists' works into the home itself. The flowery tiles covering the kitchen backsplash, for example, were designed for the space by Chuck Totten and Sherie Harnden of Totten-Harnden Tileworks in Winlock. Decorative painters Garry Transue and Deborah Scharaga transformed the 4-by-6-foot powder room into an Etruscan ruin complete with mottled walls topped by a vine-encrusted balustrade. The faux-terra-cotta floors are bordered by a real mosaic baseboard, while a painted gull cruises the cloud-dappled sky overhead.

Painted walls have an advantage in that they're hard to damage. Blown glass is quite another matter. Despite a close encounter between their daughter's "blanky" and a Dale Chihuly vase, Seidl and Ehrig say their children have adapted well to their art-filled surroundings, and no one feels as if they're living in a museum.

"Even though we have a lot of art up, and some of it is very fragile, it's a house to be lived in," says Seidl. "And if someone wants to tap their brains out on the floor - fine. We'll let 'em."

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.