Marsh Mansion Owners In Bankruptcy -- Plan To Build English Village Is Abandoned

The last tours The Marsh Commons mansion will hold its last public tours Saturday and Sunday from noon to 7 p.m. The cost is $5 for adults and $3 for children. The mansion is located at 6604 Lake Washington Blvd. in Kirkland.

KIRKLAND - Eight years ago, Clarice and Wallace Hall had a dream. They wanted to save a historic mansion near downtown Kirkland to use as a centerpiece for an upscale English-style village.

They got half the dream. The Marsh Commons mansion has been saved and officially declared historic. But the Halls are in bankruptcy and have been ordered to leave the property by Oct. 15. The last public tour of the mansion will be this weekend.

"We're going down in ashes," Clarice Hall said. "We'll be out in the street."

When the Halls, who owned a development company that built pricey homes in places like Mill Creek, first saw the old Marsh mansion and its three acres overlooking Lake Washington near downtown Kirkland, the couple wanted to save it.

"It was zoned for 36 condos," Clarice said. "We wanted to save it and build a village."

In exchange for getting the needed building permits and height variances to build a project they called Village of Marsh Commons, the Halls agreed to seek placement on the historic register for the 64-year-old property.

In 1989, it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places as well as on the state register.

The house also had to be open for public tours twice a year and meet certain guidelines for construction.

The 8,000-square-foot home was originally owned by Boeing pioneer Louis Marsh, who was one of the first engineers to work for the airplane company. He made a fortune with the company and built the home in 1929.

When he died in 1980, Marsh left the property to his favorite charity, Children's Home Society, which sold it to the Halls in 1985 for $1.5 million.

"When Clarice came into my office in the 1980s, she had in mind something very European," said Joe Tovar, who was Kirkland's city planner in 1985. "She had a vision and was very committed to preservation.

"But it was a business venture, and it was risky," said Tovar, now a member of the Central Puget Sound Growth Planning Hearings Board.

The Halls had planned to restore the mansion and put in a tea room. Then they would build 20 luxury townhouses in a village surrounding the mansion.

The homes would be patterned after the style of Marsh Commons and would cost more than $1 million apiece.

But only two had been completed and a third was under construction when things started going bad.

First, said Clarice Hall, the bank holding the money was sold, and the new bank didn't want to continue financing the project.

The Halls went to court and finally won, but only after a long battle - by which time their money had dried up.

"You can't get any money when you are in litigation," she said.

Plus there was the problem of trying to sell such expensive homes. Their price restricts them to a limited clientele - people who may not want to live on a busy street like Lake Washington Boulevard, even if their homes are surrounded by a huge fence.

In 1991, the Halls filed for bankruptcy for their three companies: Marsh Commons Limited Partnership, Hall Development Corp. and Wallace and Clarice Hall real-estate development.

The Halls sold their home and moved into the mansion. They sold other pieces of property to pay the bills, but now they have run out of places to turn for help.

"The bottom line is that after Oct. 15, we are out in the street," Clarice said. "If there is someone out there who can come forward and help us, I wish they would come forward."

Whoever ends up with the Marsh mansion will still have to live with the agreements made by the Halls. Eric Shields, Kirkland's planning director, said there "are some zoning restrictions on what can happen there and the new owners would have to abide by those restrictions. It's a historic landmark for Kirkland."

If someone wants to do something different with the property - other than keep it in historic preservation - Shields said they would have to go through the public hearing process to change the zoning.

Shields said he thought the Halls' idea for a village of townhouses "was very beautiful," but they had a select market for buyers.

"I think the price she had to charge for each unit was for a select market," he said.

"Joe (Tovar) told me he wished there were more developers like us out there," Clarice Hall said. "Now I know why."