Unveiled -- Jim Cutler Exposes Materials So You Can See How The House Goes Together

WHEN ARCHITECT JIM CUTLER WAS studying Japanese a few years ago, his teacher insisted that the best way to learn the language was to associate every word with an action. Instead of just making her students recite the word for "run," she had them run around the classroom while they said it.

"The point being," Cutler explains, "when you physically engage yourself in something, you experience it better."

The architect has applied that same principle to his practice, James Cutler Architects of Bainbridge Island. Whenever he takes on a design project, Cutler spends a day on the property with the homeowner, walking every inch of the site with a transit, measuring tape and sketch pad, preparing a complete topographical survey. (The only client to decline was Bill Gates, owner of the $30 million Medina mansion that Cutler co-designed.)

The architect's site-sensitive approach is evident in the house he designed on Hood Canal for John and Elinor Paulk. Tucked behind a grove of evergreens at the crest of a steep, waterfront site, the two-bedroom home is both a striking work of architecture and an appropriate response to the setting.

Because the 12-acre site sloped in several directions, Cutler and his project architect, Bruce Anderson, anchored the home on grade at one end and allowed the rest of the structure to float over the landscape on a kind of giant diving board. A network of braces support the building from below, leaving most of the terrain undisturbed.

The front door hovers nine feet above the ground, so Cutler and Anderson connected it to the driveway by means of a long wooden ramp. The ramp skewers the house in the middle, then continues another 119 feet out the back, culminating in a bluff-side deck veiled in a canopy of alders.

The rest of the house is long and narrow, with a metal shed roof that rises from one story in front to two stories in back. The home's form allows it to slip between tree trunks like the shuttle on a loom, and provides a stellar view of the Hood Canal and Olympic Mountains from every room.

Although the house looks big from the view side, it's really rather compact, with an open floor plan that fits the Paulks' empty-nest lifestyle. The living and dining rooms are separated from the kitchen by a free-standing divider containing the buffet on one side and the refrigerator and microwave on the other. The master suite is across the entry hall, while the guest room and office are relegated to the floor above. A breezeway links the home to a detached garage containing a workshop for John and additional guest quarters upstairs.

Cutler is known for his way with wood, and the Paulk house is no exception. The exterior is covered with natural beveled-cedar siding. Inside, the exposed fir framework is paired with maple floors and horizontal pine paneling treated with a transparent white stain. "I've had a real problem with plasterboard," the architect says. "It's at its very best the day it's painted, and does nothing but get worse after that. Wood, stone and plaster actually get better with age."

Conscious of the need to balance his love of wood with diminishing natural resources, Cutler resisted the temptation to lavish the kitchen with solid-wood cabinets. Instead, he framed the faces with clear fir, and inserted humble rotary-cut plywood panels along the front (knots and all).

Cutler wanted the house to respect its materials the same way it respected the landscape. Consequently, he left all the building components exposed, and drew attention to the way they were joined together. Floor joists were left uncovered, as were the galvanized-metal plates holding them in place. Ceilings were peeled back around the edges, revealing the rafters underneath. Stairs and decks were framed with steel cables joined with turnbuckles.

The approach was more than just an intellectual exercise, contends Cutler. "There's a sort of comfort from understanding how something goes together," he says.

Floor joists extend beyond the perimeter of the upstairs loft, ending in seemingly random lengths (all carefully calculated, of course) to suggest the natural variations in the material. The same haphazard effect is repeated underneath the house, where wood braces were applied willy-nilly to the home's pilings, in a manner inspired by Appalachian coal-mine shelters.

"We were looking for something that felt nonchalant and kind of ad-hoc," says Cutler. The architect even had the contractors, Pleasant Beach Construction of Bainbridge Island, hammer away at the foundation's concrete footings until they looked like weathered ruins.

Anxious to eliminate any pretense, Cutler placed tiny metal caps atop the rafters projecting from the roof, to keep rain from seeping into the wood. He repeated the effect on the window-washing supports, and any other place where beams were exposed to the elements. Such homespun details give the house an almost naive kind of charm.

The architect took a similarly humble approach to lighting fixtures. Downlights throughout the house are nothing more than bare bulbs plugged into exposed junction boxes framed between galvanized-metal flaps. Wall sconces are simply bulbs set behind angled metal plates.

Although Cutler explored similar concepts in the Gates house, it was a challenge adapting these ideas to the Paulks' $148-per-square-foot budget.

Which raises the question: After you've landed one of the biggest residential design commissions in American history, why go back to designing 2,000-square-foot houses?

"Our clientele is relatively normal, middle-class people," explains Cutler, who'd never designed a house larger than 4,000 square feet before Gates came along. Although the Microsoft mogul's mansion is 10 times that size, Cutler doesn't plan on changing the work he does because of one client.

"He's a great soapbox," Cutler hastens to add. "Things that I strongly believe in I get to say publicly now. And people listen."

Fred Albert writes regularly on home design for Pacific Magazine and other publications. Benjamin Benschneider is a Seattle Times photographer.