Weaving a Dream House

IF A MAN'S HOME is his castle, why shouldn't a woman's home be her sanctuary - a shrine to honor the things she loves? For Annette Stollman, a weaver living on Bainbridge Island, the house she built just over a year ago is an homage to the things she has built her life around: arts and crafts, animals and nature, family, books.

As you open the hefty front door, made from reclaimed Douglas-fir timbers dating back to the late 1800s, it's immediately clear that the main living space was designed as a workplace for Stollman. A stately 60-inch loom and two spinning wheels are framed by shelves of colorful yarn. The backdrop for the great room is an expansive bay window that looks onto a meadow filled with Shetland sheep, providers of wool for Stollman's fabric art.

Overhead are timber-framed cathedral ceilings with modified "cruck" arches, a pre-medieval building form resulting from cutting a curved tree in half and turning the halves together to form a gothic arch. The form was common in 12th-century French barns and English cathedrals.

While you're taking in the view, you are greeted by a gregarious Old English Mastiff named Dakota, clearly the "master" of the house, followed by three smaller dogs who beg him for a game of tag. They scramble across the sparse furniture, an overstuffed couch and chair in the corner. Their pillow beds are spread about on the acid-etched concrete floor designed to be both rugged and refined. It's clear that this home was built to accommodate both woman and beast.

"I'm a real homebody, and all of my energies are in this house," says 64-year-old Stollman, whose children have left the nest. "It was designed to be a tapestry of the elements of my life that are important to me."

Stollman's home was built as a work of art, employing some of the same principles that she uses in her own craft. Designers at Timbercraft Homes Inc. in Port Townsend and the building contractor, Bluefish Fine Builders of Bainbridge Island, took inspiration from the work of architect Bernard Maybeck, one of the premier California designers in the Arts and Crafts movement of the late-19th and early-20th centuries.

"Maybeck was a master of blending European and Asian design elements using the common language of wood craftsmanship," says Judith Landau, co-owner of Timbercraft Homes. "All these finely crafted elements work to create a picture of the homeowner's life, as well as create an environment that encourages creativity and peace of mind."

Everything does indeed work together in the Stollman house. The European architecture, English-style courtyard garden and sheep pasture mesh seamlessly with the house's many Asian influences, which include sparse wooden furnishings and stacked wooden, tansu-like drawers under the stairway. The gingko-leaf cut-out pattern in the winding railing that leads to the loft bedroom is an affectionate gesture, recognizing a design frequently used in fabrics during the Arts and Crafts period.

The house is a "U" shape, split into two wings: one where Stollman lives (about 1,500 square feet) and another (about 1,000 square feet) devoted to books and family. There, two guest bedrooms are linked by a shared closet and bathroom to accommodate visits from her four children and eight grandchildren. There's also a long wall of books in the main hall, which is lighted in the evening and is dramatically visible through the front window.

"My books are a kind of personal history," says Stollman. "They chronicle how my interests have evolved over time; I'm a rather eclectic person and my library reflects that. I get interested in a subject - anthropology, philosophy, history, science - and buy a bunch of books on that topic. That's how my library has grown to be so large over time."

Stollman keeps two large shelves of books on weaving, spinning and knitting in the great room. These she has collected over the past 40 years. She also keeps a cache of history books in the bedroom, one of her favorite places to read. Sitting in bed in the evening, when the ceiling timbers and warm gold walls are lit softly from the living room below, Stollman can survey the wooden beams and arches that surround her, as well as the trees that encompass the house.

Everything about this house speaks to a respect for, and integration with, the natural beauty of the land it is built on. The earth-tone walls, which have four layers of different glazes and paints, work with the various shades of wood - cherry, pine and Douglas fir - to envelop one with warmth. The rustic concrete floor, cut in squares to look like tiles, adds to the warmth with radiated heat. All this is balanced by the light streaming in through the walls of windows.

Stollman's home is located in the center of an eight-acre pasture near the Bloedel Reserve, a 150-acre former private estate with a bird marsh, English landscape, moss garden, reflection pool, Japanese garden and woodlands. When she bought the property, it came with a conservation easement permitting her to build on only 20 percent of it, with the rest remaining natural - thus, the grazing pasture.

"Buying this property was in line with my general commitment to the environment and conserving land," says Stollman, who had put a similar conservation easement on the last property she owned. "I know that the land will remain the same, even after I've left it."

Writer Jennifer Haupt lives in Bellevue. Greg Gilbert is a Seattle Times staff photographer.

.