Hidden in the Woods: An Architect’s own Mid-Century House in Portland, Oregon | House Tour

The house is a work of art, but it's not a museum. It's a place to live and everybody needs to put their stamp on it in terms of arrangement and, you know, even colors they like. Maintaining the spirit and the basic architectural integrity is what we hope for. You know, if you don't get something out of living in this house, you know, something's wrong with you, and if you don't imprint something on the house of your own personality, then you may be missing a bet. I'm William Fletcher. We are in the William Fletcher House in the area of Riverdale, just south of Portland, Oregon. The house, I believe, was built in about 1953. It was designed by my father as the first real residence for my family. The house, as mentioned, was designed by my father, William LaVenture Fletcher. He grew up just down the hill, maybe a hundred yards from here. My mother was born in Rochester, New York, and my parents met during the Second World War, when my father had been pulled off of the troop train taking him to Embarkation Point, was assigned to Officer Candidate School in upstate New York, close to where my mother was going to college at Cornell University. They met there, fell in love after the war was over, got married, and moved back here, and for a while, until my father started at the University of Oregon, lived with my grandparents in the house my father grew up in. After my father graduated from the University of Oregon with a degree in mathematics and architecture, they moved up here. So my father, my mother, and my two sisters that were born after I was, you know, spent all of their early years in this house. The estate was divided up between my grandmother and my grandfather's two sons, my father, who was the oldest, and my uncle, Robert Fletcher. You know, the question was, who gets what part of the estate that my grandmother wasn't living in? My mother, while living here, had wandered through the woods with my grandmother, and along the roadway up through here, decided that this was the location she wanted a house in. So my father got this lot, my uncle got the lot just to the north of us, and never built a house there. He had spent a lot of time over the years, and I remember as a kid, designing mausoleums around the country, including one outside of New York City where Count Basie is interred. Middle to later 50s, he started his own firm, which involved a number of other architects and interior designers, particularly among them, Saul Zake, who he later worked with on the addition to Timberline Lodge, the interior designer George Schwartz, all of them in the area, all, you know, veterans of the Second World War who had come home and gotten architecture degrees. His true love was domestic architecture. Essentially, up to the day he died, he was working on designing homes, even after he had officially retired from his firm. It's all part of the Northwest style, strongly influenced by Pietro Belushi. Belushi became a mentor to my father, and they became friends, and so, you know, stayed in contact, you know, both professionally and socially until Pietro died. Not too long ago, one of Pietro's houses came on the market, you know, saw the advertising for it, and you could see where dad had gotten a lot of his inspiration from, and then he grew from there, and he wasn't just copying Pietro, but it was the starting point. You grow up in a home, and it becomes sort of a template. Pretty much established the architectural basis for me and my sister's idea of what houses should look like with the open plan, with, you know, like a kitchen that is connected but not part of the primary living area. One of the things that I've always appreciated, once I started thinking about it, in this larger living area, it is, it's sort of expandable, shrinking spaces, so it's very deliberate that the cabinet that separates the dining room table from the area where the bookshelves and whatever are was there, and the big support beam going down the house, because that provides more of a psychological break than a physical break, so you can have a party where everybody in the space is included. You could have an intimate dinner party there and not feel overwhelmed that you're sitting in a room that's too big. You could have separate conversations going on here and there and there without people feeling like they were bumping into each other. When first moved in, it was, you know, my dad, my mother, and myself. A year or two after we moved into the house, my sister Stacy was born. For a while, we shared a bedroom, but that really was obviously not a good long-term solution, so they put, in 1955, I think it was, they added a room on the south end of the house by the kitchen that became the master bedroom, and added a bathroom to that, a bathroom with a shower. One of the features of the house was originally there was a carport under the south end of the house, so the house was up on stilts. There's a carport with a very steep drive down to it. That quickly became clear that, no, you didn't really want to park your car down there because there's a pain in the butt. This is back in the days where everything was manual. My dad's early office when he was doing stuff, the furnace room, he's got the furnace and just enough room for his drawing board and a chair and whatever down there. So that became just sort of an open, sheltered area where we stored stuff for years. Well, after my parents left, my mom was left with myself, Stacy, and my youngest sister, Laura. The two girls were sharing one bedroom up here. I had the old master bedroom. Being the firstborn, I got the first choice of the bedroom. My mother decided Stacy needed a room of her own, so we enclosed the basement. There wasn't really any good place to put a stairwell down, so one of the closets in my room cleaned that out. It's a little square area, cut a hole in the floor, and put a ladder down there. Growing up through grade school and all the way through high school, my sister had to go through my bedroom in order to get down to her bedroom. You'll see that there's, you know, reds and blues on the outside. The south side of the house there, you'll see, you know, the panels are all painted blue. Originally they were, I believe at some point, you know, four panels. There's blue, red, blue, red, and then as the material deteriorated and needing to be replaced, it was easier to put in, you know, a long panel and just paint it blue as opposed to blue, red, blue doors in the house and stuff like that. Later on, my father moved away from bright colors on the exteriors of houses, so lots of them are more natural colors. You know, what you started with here, you've got the dark stained wood is also part of the exterior. The wood panels and whatever here have never been painted. The rock that makes up the fireplace and was, you know, a refuge during the Columbus Day storm was queried off of Rocky Butte here in Portland. My father selected and told the masons where each rock was supposed to go. He was a very meticulous architect. If something, you know, if a gap was a quarter of an inch too big, he would make the contractors redo it. He was nitpicky to the extreme when it came to the houses, but, you know, one of his jobs and the job of a good architect is to go through and follow the construction to make sure they're doing what they are supposed to do and that they end up with a quality home. I would imagine that the quality, the physical quality of the homes my father designed and oversaw the construction of are all very good. This house has been here for 70 years. The couple that purchased the house, we were thrilled that they were modern house geeks, really. I loved it. They have done a very nice job of selecting pieces of art. Obviously, they've made changes and, you know, they've got some different furniture. They got to keep the couches, which my father designed, and the cabinet there, which I think he also designed and he may have built it. It feels very much at home. It feels like, you know, somebody else is making this a home now. Embraced, you know, the feeling of the house without being overly constrained by its historic figure. So, I like, you know, coming in and, you know, they're very welcoming people and they've done a nice job of bringing it back up to snuff. You know, if somebody lives in a house for a long time, nine, eight years old, you know, things begin to get a little ragged around the edges. So, they've done an excellent job of that. So, it just, you know, it feels very comfortable for me to come back. In some ways, you know, a weird way, partially harder to let go of the house than it was my mother. You know, my sisters and I had been taking care of her for a while in her declining months. She'd worn out. She had lived her life and so when she went, it was a release and she was in, you know, a bit of pain from having fallen and broken stuff and she, you know, her eyesight wasn't that good and she had the last years of her life become more and more interested in drawings and paintings and stuff like that. I told her, well, you know, I'm sure you'll keep on going as long as you're drawing. Well, the day before she died, she didn't draw anything. I asked her, did you draw anything yesterday? She said, no, there should have been a clue to me that she was going to pass away. So, that was, you know, in a strange way, sort of a relief, but then leaving the house, which has been, you know, sort of like the central, when we talk of home, you know, we all have our own well-established homes, my sisters and I. It's still like, you know, this is mom's house, but this is also our house. It's so much a part of not just the family, but the family history. Having the combination of the open space where, you know, like the family could be in here doing stuff on their own or together, you know, gives a nice connection to the family. Thank God we didn't have streaming and videos and stuff like that, but also being able to have our own rooms and spaces where we could be alone on our own. I think, you know, molds one's personality. We're definitely a family, quite different from each other, but we've got a shared aesthetic and, you know, shared experience of being here. The woods themselves are part of the house. My father's daughter, by a second marriage, you know, understandably had never been over here until after my mother had died, you know, we're getting the house, so we invited her over to come see it. She walked in through the front door, looked through, as you can see, you come in through the front door and you look and you see out into the woods and she just stopped and her mouth dropped open. And she grew up in a house that dad designed in the woods also that also has views. So, you know, like it's the stunning views, the sense of calm and peace that you have if you're lucky enough to live in the woods and have the view. So, you know, one of the things a lot of my fathers have is that there is both a separation but a connection to the outside. You know, you're not looking through a small window. You don't need to have curtains hiding you from the world. You're part of the woods, you know, sits in, even with the bright colors, it fits into the landscape.