What $3.2 million buys in Lake Stevens

LAKE STEVENS — It’s move-in ready.

No lawn mower or vacuum cleaner needed, but a bathing suit is.

There’s no carpet or grass in this $3.2 million showplace that sits on 1.5 acres with 120 feet of waterfront and a boathouse.

The home is a remodel of a 1962 house by Paul Hayden Kirk, a Pacific Northwest architect renowned for his mid-century modern designs.

Even if you can’t afford a monthly payment of about $15,000 (that is, with 20 percent down), you can tour the home that’s hidden from the road but turns heads from the lake.

Anchor your boat or park your car for the open house Aug. 11.

The 4,850-square-foot house, which went on the market in June, has five bedrooms, six bathrooms, three laundry rooms, two rooftop putting greens and more lights per square foot than any home in town.

“There are 5,000 (lights) on the whole property,” homeowner Adrianna Lower-Stephenson said. “I went a little crazy, but everything is on dimmers. An electronic system controls everything… the lighting, shades, surround sound, security with doors on a bolt system.”

The floors are bamboo. The beach is flat and sandy. The lawn is artificial turf, though the landscaping is real.

Other features of the wowie-zowie house: Glass knobs on the refrigerator, chandeliers in bathrooms, shoe closet, eight-burner gas stove, sauna, gym, heated lap pool/hot tub, outdoor seating venues plus a four-car garage topped with a separate guest suite.

With a pad like this, you will have guests.

Some invited, others curious.

The house draws onlookers from the lake. Lower-Stephenson said she often looks out to see people stopped in boats, taking photos.

“I see myself on Facebook all the time,” she said.

Lower-Stephenson and her then-husband lived in Everett when they purchased the house in 2009, after looking for four years for a place to remodel for their family. They own Heated Details, a digital marketing agency with an office on Hewitt Avenue that closed in 2012 when they expanded in downtown Seattle.

When their agent sent the listing for the Kirk home, “We put in an offer in five minutes,” Lower-Stephenson said. According to property records, they paid $999,999.

The couple and their two daughters continued to live in Everett during the remodel that took two years.

“I was here every day,” she said.

Lower-Stephenson is not an architect or engineer. She has two degrees in social sciences. After graduating from the University of Washington in 1992, she worked as a background investigator with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management before co-founding the advertising agency in 1998 that specializes in marketing and development of products, not property.

Lower-Stephenson designed the remodel, her fourth for residential. An architect and a structural engineer made blueprints for the builder for the renovations.

She also came up with innovations, such as the coating on the deck: “It’s Rhino Guard spray which is usually used in the back of trucks. Hose it off and it’s good to go, especially with kiddos,” she said.

Her daughters, Logan, 11, and Harlan, 8, like to spend their time playing in the lake and in their wing of the house.

She didn’t know much about Paul Kirk before buying the Lake Stevens house. Kirk’s homes are distinguishable boxy forms with simple lines, flat roofs and floor-to-ceiling windows.

“He really wanted to bring nature into the house. He had a very certain style,” Lower-Stephenson said. “We went through hundreds of hours trying to pull things from other properties he had done, choosing materials to represent what he did. We did a hodgepodge of other designs of his into this one because we just couldn’t resurrect all the parts of his original design in this. We wanted to make sure it still had him in it.”

Most of Kirk’s works are in King County, and include churches, libraries and the UW Faculty Club that is suspended above the hillside on steel beams.

Kirk did several other homes in Snohomish County, including one in Everett’s View Ridge neighborhood that sold in 2014 for $772,000. Molly Haines of Keller Williams Eastside was the real estate agent for the Kirk home in Everett and is the listing broker for the one in Lake Stevens.

“I have seen many, many homes in my career, and this is by far one of the most spectacular homes,” Haines said. “The architecture, attention to detail and overall quality is hard to even compare.”

It’s the highest-priced home on the market in Lake Stevens, she said.

The home’s wooden structure had moisture damage when they purchased it.

“Most of the walls and beams were not salvageable. Rather than repair, we started from scratch. We ended up pretty much taking everything down,” Lower-Stephenson said. “It was on a Jenga kind of device to hold up the house.”

New supports were installed and a third floor was added. The layout was changed, but the footprint of the home stayed the same.

“We couldn’t copy everything, but we tried to get the essence of what the house was,” Lower-Stephenson said. “We wanted to do it justice.”

She is selling the house to pursue a new project.

Andrea Brown: abrown@heraldnet.com; 425-339-3443. Twitter @reporterbrown.

Visit

The open house is 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Aug. 11, 607 Stitch Road, Lake Stevens.

More at www.kw.com.

Can you afford it?

Price:$3,200,000

Down payment, 20 percent: $640,000

Monthly payment on 30-year mortgage at 4.6 percent: $13,124 (this does not include annual property taxes of about $15,000 plus insurance)

Over 30 years on the loan amount of $2,560,000, the interest is $2,164,529.

Source: Zillow