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There are no private cars at Decatur Northwest, above, in the San Juan Islands; people and their goods get around by golf cart and microminivan. (photo: Lara Swimmer) |
| At Decatur Northwest, a development in the San Juan Islands, houses are few and hidden and cars are nonexistent. by Eric Fredericksen Twice a day, a small private ferry pulls up next to a dock in Sylvan Cove on Decatur Island, a hilly, wooded dot amid the San Juan Islands. Running back and forth to Anacortes, Washington, it carries people and their belongings to the island, where visitors are greeted by the sight of a small group of well-maintained white clapboard houses, most of which date back 80 years. Sheep graze freely, scattered around a small meadow. Wooded hills frame the cove, with other, more modern houses visible through the trees--but only a few. The intended impression: Here is a place that has not been ruined. Disembarking passengers are encouraged to help unload the boat's cargo of suitcases and boxes, and, on one recent morning, a birdcage housing a pair of cockatiels. (There's usually a fair amount of cargo--there's not a single store on Decatur.) Everything is carted in plastic wheelbarrows up to shore, where a pair of Daihatsu microminivans and a group of golf carts stand by to transport residents and their belongings to their houses. Private cars are forbidden in Decatur Northwest, the development that covers this end of the island. The San Juans--idyllic, woodsy, isolated islands in the middle of Puget Sound, about 80 miles north of Seattle--have long been popular among vacationers. Though much of the land was clear-cut 75 years ago, the regrown forests offer impressive stands of Douglas fir, cedar, and hemlock, laced with the smooth, red trunks of madrona trees. Deer are everywhere, grazing calmly by the roadside. But as the Northwest grows and its economy booms, development is coming to more and more of the islands. And though various preserves and parks exist, most of the land is private property, available for building. It's a very American paradox: thousands of people seeking their own little place in the wilderness, and collectively destroying that wilderness. The forested slopes that make up most of Decatur Northwest didn't strike everyone who saw them as important to preserve. In the early 1970s, a developer planned to cram 520 homes onto the 485 acres, serviced by an airstrip and a 120-slip marina. But before he could do much more than clear land for the airstrip (still a large scar in Decatur Northwest's highlands), that developer went bankrupt. The property was soon acquired by Jim Youngren, owner of a salmon hatchery on nearby Orcas Island, who formed a partnership with Phil Sherburne, a former planner for the city of Seattle, to try again. Sherburne started by talking to people who already had homes on the islands. While they loved their property when they bought it, many began to like it less and less as new homes went in, trees came down, and fences went up. So he conceived a plan to guarantee that the natural beauty that brought people to the island wouldn't disappear. Sherburne found sites for only about 80 homes, accounting for just three percent of the land. Most of these are grouped along the shoreline, with a few atop a hill and a few more around a meadow and an old farmhouse. And while the old plan called for standard, rectangular plots, Sherburne's sites are circles, generally 75 feet in diameter. (He says, "Circles seemed like they floated. Squares don't float. With circles, people don't think in terms of boundaries.") By buying one of these circles, an owner also buys into the collective ownership of the other 97 percent of Decatur Northwest, which has been left largely untouched. A few buildings serve the whole community: the caretaker's house, which includes a library and guest rooms; and the community building, which houses a woodworking shop, garage, firefighting equipment, laundry, sauna, and hot tub. The development also has tennis courts, a couple of community gardens, and a swimming lake with a bridge and gazebo. But much of Decatur Northwest, especially its highlands, is forest, with barely navigable trails winding through it. The few roads are narrow and mostly unpaved. Residents walk a lot; some use golf carts to get around. The houses in Decatur Northwest have little in common with the ersatz châteaux that dominate country-home construction in the areas surrounding Seattle. Most houses use the island's topography, opposing orientations, and trees for privacy, rather than physical distance or fences. Owners and architects face a stringent design review board, which encourages houses that blend with the landscape. Many of the houses are constructed in several small masses instead of in large, bulky forms. But despite the restrictions and the small lots, the houses are far from modest cottages. Several have been featured in Metropolitan Home, Architectural Record, and regional lifestyle magazines. They're not cheap either, going for around $500,000, about twice what houses elsewhere on the island sell for. The Miller/Hull Partnership, a Seattle architecture firm, has designed several houses on the island, using elegant techniques to minimize the buildings' bulk, such as using individual, connected buildings to create separate living, sleeping, and working spaces. Tim Girvin, owner of a Seattle graphic design company, has had a Miller/Hull-designed house on Decatur for five years. His house, which he says evokes a northeastern fishing hut with Scandinavian elements, overlooks Brigantine Bay and nearby Trump Island. A long, glassed-in space dominates the main building; a second, connected building houses an office, angled to fit into circular plot. The city-dwelling Girvin did have reservations about moving to Decatur Northwest. "At first, I was concerned about the notion of community," he says, since many of the residents are professionals--a lot of doctors, lawyers, and judges--and were, by his standards, fairly conservative. But he now finds himself leading hikes for children on the island. Puget Sound has a long history of "intentional communities," dating back to turn-of-the-century communes like the semi-anarchistic Home and the socialistic Equality Colony. In his 1975 book, Utopias on Puget Sound 1885--1915, historian Charles Pierce LeWarne noted that the area's experiments had many similarities, from commonly owned land to the aspiration to become an ideal society. More recent efforts include communities like Winslow Cohousing, a 90-person development near Seattle, where residents share common spaces and land titles. Decatur Northwest embodies elements of that tradition, though it has little formal ideology, subsisting instead on a vague environmental consciousness. Decatur Northwest's successes--financial, aesthetic, and conservational--also suggest interesting parallels with several new ideas of community, from New Urbanist developments, which leave swaths of land undeveloped to appease growth-limitation ordinances, to the strong and often insular sense of community frequently noted in gated communities. Phil Sherburne doesn't deny points of comparison between his project and communes, and also cites the Charles Moore--designed Sea Ranch in California as inspiration. But, he says, most of the project was suggested by direct experience. "It mostly came out of the ground, what we saw up there." Sherburne notes that other communities in Puget Sound have begun to draw on Decatur Northwest for inspiration, including the Eagle Lake development on Orcas Island. And he is now working on a 115-acre parcel adjacent to Decatur Northwest, which the developers held in reserve. He says he'll plat no more than 13 sites there. |
Keywords:
Decatur Northwest, San Juan Islands, Puget Sound
