Echoes of Mérida, Marfa, and Judd

Q: What’s the story of how this home came to be yours?

Dana: We were in Amsterdam, not looking, not even thinking about it. Will was at a market and I, for no particular reason, started looking at houses online. I never do that. This strange, beautiful Mediterranean house appeared. Through all the wallpaper and the tight 1940s rooms, I could see the bones so clearly. And the garden looked almost Japanese - moss-covered paths winding between large boulders, prehistoric plants crawling over everything, a twenty-foot hedge. I’d always wanted a compound.

It was on Mt. Tabor, too, which I’d long imagined living on someday; one of only three volcanoes in the center of any city in the world.

Will came out of the market and I put my phone in his face and said, we’re buying this house. He called his mom and his best friend to go look at it for us. They both thought we were crazy. They couldn’t see what we saw—how much character was already built into it. We made an offer from Amsterdam without ever seeing it ourselves.

Q: The house was in rough shape when you bought it. What did “getting it right” actually require?

Will: The plaster curves were intact, and they were the reason we bought it. Almost everything else needed to go. New electrical, new plumbing, water meter, earthquake retrofit, structural work throughout. You have to do all of that before you can do any of what you actually care about, and you have to do it without losing the thread of what the house is supposed to become. That’s the part that takes discipline.

Once the infrastructure was resolved we could focus on what the house wanted to be. We replastered throughout, working with a craftsman who understood what we were after, someone who could respond to the original character rather than just produce smooth walls. That softness and curve are warm and almost disarming. The floor plan was opened carefully. The lower level was transformed from raw basement space into a proper bedroom / office, and workspace with its own entrance and light, so the separation between work and the rest of life is genuine rather than improvised. The kitchen was rebuilt around walnut cabinetry and appliances chosen the way we chose everything else, for how they’d actually perform in daily use. The bathroom followed: white oak cabinetry, Watermark fixtures, Heath tile, electric floor heat, and a deep soaker tub that looks out onto a wall of greenery. Each material held against the same question we asked at the start. Does it belong here, or does it just look good somewhere else?

Q: You’ve described this renovation as designing a retreat. What did that actually mean in practice?

Will: We’d all traveled enough to know what it feels like when a place does something to you immediately, when the architecture lands before you’ve had time to think about it. We wanted that here. Every decision went through the same question: does this make the house feel more like somewhere you’d choose, or less? It’s a simple question and a ruthless one. It cuts a lot of options fast.

That filter sharpened things further. Three people, three careers, three ways of moving through a day. The house had to work for all of it at once, which meant nothing could be left vague or assumed. Specificity in the plan produced specificity in the result. Nothing in it is accidental.

Dana: The plaster and tiles carry Mérida’s feeling of being perpetually indoors and outdoors at once. The white-washed walls, large art pieces, Percival leather chairs, jute, and baskets are all Marfa - that precise balance between Southwestern warmth and contemporary restraint.
We were especially drawn to Donald Judd’s compound and ended up designing our cement garden beds after the form of his pool.

When Covid hit and travel felt suddenly impossible, we built the pool, greenhouse, and additional garden beds as an extension of the house outward. What surprised us was that it wasn’t the pool itself that changed the feeling - it was the presence of water. A body of water balanced something that had been leaning too far toward desert and Mediterranean.

Will: We always knew the yard was part of the house. The pool, the spa, the greenhouse, the garden beds, the pump house all came from a desire to extend the architecture outward and create a place where we could genuinely inhabit four seasons in the Pacific Northwest. A place apart from the city, with nooks for gathering, for reading, for gardening. In a climate where outdoor space gets written off for half the year, we wanted to write nothing off. The pergola, the privacy walls, the heated pool: all of it was designed to keep you outside longer than the weather suggests you should be. By July the yard is the house. You eat out there, work out there, lose track of time out there in a way that feels closer to somewhere in southern Europe than southeast Portland.

What we didn’t anticipate was how the pool would actually alter the feeling of the entire property. Not the amenity of it. On a still morning, with the garden beds full and the light coming in low over the hedge, there is a moment where the yard stops reading as Portland entirely. The original composition had leaned too far toward desert and Mediterranean, and a body of water brought it back into balance. That surprised us. You can design carefully toward something and still be surprised by what resolves it.

Q: Three people, three careers, a lot of working from home. How does the house actually hold all of that?

Will: We didn’t design around productivity. We designed around restoration. Those are different briefs, and they produce different houses. The lower level took the work question off the table entirely. A dedicated space completely removed from the main floor. Once that was resolved, the rest of the house could be about shared life without friction.

Whitney: I always tease Dana about this—she’s probably the most dynamic part of the house. As the sun moves, she moves. Every few months, or when the seasons shift, she gets intrigued by a new space. Suddenly her desk and papers and books will have migrated somewhere new, and suddenly she can focus again. I’m a therapist, so I tend to watch the human element as much as the environment—and what I notice is that the house mimics the way we travel: sunflooded spaces ideal for reading, nooks that help you get lost in your own thoughts. We move around Dana a little, but the house is honestly set up for exactly that kind of rotation. It changes with the length of day, with damp rain versus early sun. It rarely snows in Portland, but when it does the house transforms again—bright cool light, the fireplace, the plaster walls almost blending with the outside.

Q: The plaster curves and the fireplace are the first things you encounter. How far were you willing to push the original character of the house?

Dana: The house had its own logic before we touched it.

The house had serpentine plaster curves throughout, and when we took most of it back to the studs, the cheaper path would have been to box everything in and start clean. But we knew that would cost the house its most immersive quality—that sense of being inside something that had been shaped rather than built. So we leaned in, most visibly in the living room, where we redesigned the fireplace into a curved sculptural form, turning a brick block into something that felt alive.

Will: Not far enough, at first. Early on we kept pulling back, asking whether the curves were too much or the detailing too specific. We were editing the house’s best quality out of caution, which is a particular kind of mistake because it feels like restraint when it’s actually just hesitation.

The fireplace is where we stopped doing that. The straightforward option was right there, cleaner, simpler, easier to defend. We walked away from it and rebuilt the fireplace as a sculptural curved form instead, something that felt shaped rather than constructed. It’s the first thing people respond to when they walk in, almost without exception. But more than that, it’s where the house became itself. Trusting that one decision made the rest of the work clearer. Once we stopped questioning it and started deepening it, everything resolved faster and better than it had before. That’s probably the thing this renovation taught us that we’ll carry into every project going forward.

Q: You’re leaving Portland for Paris. What does a house like this leave you with?

Whitney: I’d never lived somewhere where space felt like distinct environments—not just rooms, but different states of mind. With three people under one roof, that distinction mattered more than I expected. It lends itself to movement, to small areas where you do certain things, become a certain version of yourself. I think we’re all hoping we can find something like that in Paris—that same flood of light, but with French doors, coffee on a small balcony, somewhere to retreat and focus. The needs are clear now in a way they weren’t before we lived here. That feels like what the house actually gave us.

Will: What we’ll miss is specific to this place. The pool, the greenhouse, Northwest mornings and golden hour in the garden, the light in the round room before the day gets going. Those were gifts of this house and this location. They don’t travel. What does travel is the standard you’ve set and the confidence that you can build it again wherever you go.

Dana: A home should feel like somewhere you’d choose to arrive. We knew it from the first time we saw the listing photograph while traveling in Amsterdam, and seven years later, the house makes that case every day.

We would like to thank Dana, Will and Whitney for helping us tell the story of their property so eloquently.