Tiny modern home remade for bright light and big views

I HAVE TO go to the bathroom.

No, really, I do. Because thats where the glass-wall shower is. The one that appears to be hanging in midair, higher than the treetops, peering over Lake Washington far and wide. The Cascades stuffed into little white hats and lurking there behind the bright and shiny skyscrapers of Bellevue.

Homeowner Dilys Walker leads the way and simply waves toward the room as introduction.

It needs no other.

The No. 1 priority for us was the view, says Walker. With that she heads to the master bedroom. Same view, only this time Walker and her husband, Stefano Bertozzi, can get it lying down, snuggled beneath comforters.

Walker and Bertozzi, both doctors, moved to Seattle from Mexico when he took a job with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Their home in Cuernavaca, of course, had a strong indoor-outdoor connection, and they wanted that here, too. The couple rented in Leschi initially, mapping out nearby open houses for house-hunting walks.

We crossed it off our list because it was a one-bedroom, Walker says of their home, a real study in geometry cloaked in silver standing-seam metal and stark-white-painted cedar. But we went anyway. The minute we walked in, literally, we knew that this was it. From then on it was, How can we make this for us?

It was something they thought about for a year, cramming themselves into the place, daughter Lena, 13, sleeping in the closet. (It was a really big closet, with windows, her mother says.)

Robert Hutchison, their architect, describes his work as a substantial interior renovation. But it feels more like a residential rebirth: the 1980s home cantilevered over its steep slope (tests were done; the home is securely tethered) with that new master suite. Above that is a ships-ladder climb to a crows nest of a loft: Bertozzis office.

We loved the whole idea of keeping the white shell and making it more organic within, Walker says.

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Tiny modern home remade for bright light and big views