Ballard Cut’s second-floor master suite offers even more dramatic views than those from the living areas below it, and a green roof over the lower volume adds further interest. Project designer Dan Wickline’s primary challenge lay in defining function areas without blocking channels to that view, all while striking the appropriate balance between openness and privacy.
Bathing in the bedroom is a binary decision; there are those who like it and those who emphatically do not. Ballard Cut’s owners are in the former camp, and Wickline obliged by locating a tub at the window wall, where the view angles are widest. Set in a concrete plaster base, and positioned as a hinge point between the bedroom and bathroom, it promotes soaking as a social pursuit. “From the bathroom, it feels like the tub is part of the bathroom, but it’s also open to the bedroom,” Wickline says. “You can access the tub from both spaces.”
The bathroom proper begins simply enough, with a twin-sink lavatory, a walk-in shower, and a toilet compartment, all in a boxlike container. But Wickline’s removal of strategic elements of that box yields a strikingly deconstructed space. The sink wall ends at mid-span, leaving the zebrawood-framed mirror and lavatory cabinet (both supported by hidden cantilevered steel structures) to continue without it, and opening a watery vista toward the west. The shower opens vertically, with a skylight larger than the shower itself. “So when you’re in the shower and you look up,” Wickline says, “you see nothing. It’s just sky."
