Lofty family room in the only possible place: atop the garage

Sunset, Nov, 1988

Tightly wedged on a hillside lot, this dignified Seattle house had only one place to add a new family room and deck: atop a two-car garage off to one side.

Owners Lovett and Tomio Moriguchi asked the architectural firm of Dawson Hoshide Williams to design a big, singlelevel space, one that would blend with their 1926 house. The result is the lofty, 480-square-foot family room pictured above. The designers also snugged in a 120-square-foot storage space for garden tools (at far left in center picture).

To help link the addition visually to the house, the architects picked brick as the outside material. But where could they find bricks that matched the house's weathered ones? When breaking through the house's outside wall for the addition, the crew saved all the knocked-out bricks. Since only the streetside wall of the bigwindowed addition needed to match, they had plenty of bricks for the job. Bricks were cleaned and put in place. The end wall and back of tbe addition were finished with stucco.

Out front, atop the garage, the landscape design firm Thomas L. Berger Associates added a generous deck. Floored in masonry tile, wrapped with wrought-iron railing, and capped with a trellis, the space is enclosed enough to feel neither exposed nor perilously lofty Yet it gets full sun and offers a good view of the Olympic range. Wisteria crawls across the trellis, adding greenery to the deck and softening the addition's impact.

The deck connects gracefully to a new front entry. Tiered concrete retaining walls and a zigzagging stairway reach down to street level. They replace an old, leaning wall and cracked stairway.