link to article - Scott Edwards Architecture

Developers Mary Jones and Jeff Schons could’ve built anything
on their 1 1/2-acre parcel in Pacific City, Ore. Check out their
cabin-esque haven that’s home for a generations-spanning family.
“We broke up the house and elongated it on the ocean-facing side to minimize the overall scale of the house,”
says architect Kelly Edwards of Mary
Jones and Jeff Schons’ new 5,000square-foot home in Pacific City, Ore.
“Our intent was to make the house
look as if it were several small cabins
clustered together rather than one
giant house.” Haystack Rock, just a
mile away as the bald eagle flies,
looms off nearby Cape Kiwanda.
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b y S h e i l a D e L a R o s a
P h o t o g r a p h y b y D av i d Pa pa z i a n
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Jones and Schons, with Carole and Peter
BEWARE OF WHERE YOU ALLOW
your preteens to spend the night. What’s
in their sightline as their eyelids sleepily close could become a must-have in a
custom home 40 years from now. That’s
what happened to Jeff Schons, who with
his wife, Mary J. Jones, are the owners
of Nestucca Ridge Development Inc. in
Pacific City, Ore. “When I was 10 or 12
years old, I stayed with my friends at a
Mt. Hood cabin that had a second floor
that was open to the main level on four
sides,” says Schons. “A ‘big hole’ on the
second floor like that and a huge fireplace
were the two things I most wanted in this
house. Kelly, our architect, kept trying
to give me what I was asking for without
wasting so much square footage by hav-
first F loor
Bath
Garage
Carole’s
Room
Firepit
Mudroom
Vanities
and Shower
Patio
“The house is such a
wide and deep building
which required lowerFoyer
Master
Bedroom
we’d lose a little view
of the ocean, but what
Mary and I really wanted was the feeling of
living in the forest.”
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Living
Room
Bath
Guest Room
Kitchen
Porch
Den
Closet
Bath
a large area of the lot,
says Schons. “We knew
S econd F loor
Pantry
that we had to flatten
ing the site 8 feet,”
Soaking Tub
and Steamer
Craft
Room
Open to
below
Dining
Room
Exercise Room
Bedroom
“Sometimes I cook for 12; sometimes for 20,” says Jones of her ocean-view kitchen.
Pendants from Avalanche Ranch Light Company illuminate stools from Pottery Barn.
ing ‘a big hole.’ Finally, I said, ‘Kelly, just
draw it!’ I knew it would waste a lot of
usable square footage, but I just couldn’t
let go of having the second floor open to
the first like I’d seen in that cabin I stayed
at when I was a boy.”
A lesser architect might’ve balked,
but Kelly Edwards, a principal of Scott
Edwards Architecture LLP in Portland,
knew to give his longtime client what he
wanted. The architect first hooked up
with Jones and Schons nearly a decade
ago, when the couple was still living in
their 700-square-foot “little river house”
on the Nestucca River. The former
Portlanders had arrived in Pacific City
in 1990 to spend the winter in Schons’
1950s-era cabin while waiting out landuse approval for a small development project in Washington county.
“I’d just sold my part of a construction
company that I’d owned with my brother,
so we were decompressing from being in
the Portland area our whole lives,” says
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Schons. “We just loved being here. And
we could see opportunity, so we started
buying real estate. And then this property that we’re on now, which happened to
be at the end of the street we were living
on, came up for sale. We kept walking the
property and pretty soon we decided to
take a run at the 35 acres and try to buy
it and develop it.”
The subdivision, known as Nestucca
Ridge, is a mix of full-time residences
and second homes. The couple set aside
11/2 acres—three lots—near the top of the
property for their own future home. Surprisingly, the land wasn’t the parcel with
the best ocean views. “This is a unique
lot,” says Schons, an avid fisherman.
“We’ve got ocean views, river front 90 feet
down the ridge and, with all the Sitka
spruce trees on the property, the feeling
of being in the woods even though you’re
in a development.”
A decade later, Edwards—with his business partner Sid Scott—has tackled such
commercial properties for the couple as
the Inn at Cape Kiwanda, the renovation of the Pelican Pub & Brewery, the
masterplan for Shorepine Village and a
dreamhouse for their company’s newest
development, Pacific Seawatch. The men
are also deer- and elk-hunting buddies.
“It’s a great benefit to work with an
architect who really knows you,” says
Jones. “He knew, for example, that we
didn’t want a house that looked enormous. That, and the outdoor living spaces were important to us. Jeff and I also
share a common need for lots of wood.”
And how! Walk into the front door
of the Jones-Schons house—which was
designed to also accommodate Schons’
mother, Carole, and the couple’s 16-yearold son, Peter—and the massive Douglas fir beams, kitchen cabinetry and
hardwood floors give you a Timberline
Lodge-warm feeling. Sophie, the family’s
German short-haired pointer, assumes
the role of resident St. Bernard.
“The way the design of the house
evolved has everything to do with the
similarities—and the differences—between
Mary and Jeff,” says Edwards. “Jeff is a
friendly guy. He has a lot of memories of
lodges with big timbers. He remembers
waking up in upstairs bedrooms with
heavy timbers on the ceilings above him.
So he wanted a big fireplace with a rustic
hearth that you could almost walk into.
“Mary, by contrast, is outgoing, too, but
she wanted a refuge from the public life,”
says the architect. “She’s an outdoorsytype. She wanted a nice secluded outdoor
space with sunshine coming in it, where
“It’s a pretty daunting task when you’re
standing at ground level looking up
at this big tower of raw masonry and
you’re looking at 16 pallets of stone that
you have to place,” says Travis Kiser of
All Phase Tile and Masonry in Lincoln
City, Ore. He and a crew of four men
spent three months veneering the chimney with 5-inch-thick Holly Stone, which
Jones and Schons selected to complement the color of Haystack Rock. Larry
Davis of Blue Stone Masonry in Lincoln
City built the 34-foot-tall substructure.
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O reg o n H o m e 79
she could sit and read a book. So while Jeff
wanted this massive lodge environment,
neither of them wanted a house that was
ostentatious. My goal with the design of
the house was to give Jeff his grand space;
Mary, her private space; Carole, a place in
which she could have her own identity yet
always be able to interact with the family;
and Peter, a private space that opened
onto family space.”
Edwards dreamed up a wide and deep
5,000-square-foot home (with an attached
1,000-square-foot-garage) that meets each
family member’s needs. Best of all, his
design makes it look as if the house is
a compound of three rustic board-andbatten cabins built near each other rather
than one sprawling McMansion.
The entrance from the garage to the
lodgelike part of the residence takes you
past Carole’s quarters, a light-filled suite
that opens onto a bluestone terrace, complete with firepit, hot tub and outdoor
entertaining areas, on the river side of
the house. One hallway later, you pass the
home’s real front door and the foyer, and
arrive in the Great Room. A 34-foot-tall
chimney fronted with a carefully selected
dark basalt called Holly Stone pays homage to Haystack Rock, which is visible
through the oversized windows that front
the ocean-facing side of the residence.
After you ogle the family’s panoramic
view of the Pacific, you simply can’t miss
Schons’ pride and joy: his “big hole,” an
empty volume of space that’s edged on the
second floor with a hand-forged iron railing that’s the handiwork of Jeff Wester of
Ponderosa Forge in Sisters, Ore.
The home’s second level has the bedroom with the best view in the house,
Peter’s room. Pocket doors in one wall of
his room open to the ‘big hole,’ around
which, on the second level, are areas that
include a small exercise station facing
the ocean, a gunsafe set into the Great
Room’s fireplace as the stonework tapers
toward the roof, and an informal den.
Jones’ crafts room, a guest room and guest
bath, and the staircase to the first level fill
the rest of the upper level.
As killer as the view is in the Great
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“This is a good place to watch the storms
roll in,” says Jones. “In the summer, they
come from the northwest. In the winter,
from the southwest. I’ve never felt scared
in this house the way I’ve felt in other
houses on the coast, but the windows
definitely move. They flex in and out,
especially at night.” The custom sofa and
chairs are from Seldens in Seattle.
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Where’d
they get
. . . the pendants.
From the Avalanche Ranch Light Company in
Bellingham, Wash. (888-841-1810 or
avalanche-ranch.com). “We looked
everywhere for light fixtures for weeks
without any luck and they were ready to
install the lighting, so I Googled RUSTIC LIGHT FIXTURES
and these came up,” says Mary Jones. “I had
Avalanche Ranch send us their catalog and we bought
some stock items and ordered some custom fixtures.
They weren’t very expensive. In the evenings, the lights
give the house a fabulous amber glow.”
. . . the in-chimney gun safe.
From their architect, Kelly Edwards, Scott Edwards Architecture LLP in Portland (503-226-3617 or seallp.com). Jeff
Wester of Ponderosa Forge in Sisters, Ore. (541-549-4511
or ponderosaforge.com), fabricated the wrought-iron brackets, doorframe and railing balustrades. “The gun safe was
totally Kelly’s idea,” says Schons. “We’ve gone elk hunting
and deer hunting together for years and somewhere, as he was
bringing together the Great Room design, this gun safe appeared on the
blueprints. He said, ‘It just seems like the perfect place for one because
it’ll always be dry from the heat in the fireplace.’ I was sold on the idea
in about 30 seconds. He made it large enough to hold 20 guns, but I only
have six or seven stored in there for now.”
Jones likes it for safety and aesthetic reasons. “I like that it keeps the guns
locked up and it’s also nicer to look at than just a big wall of rock.”
. . . vintage hammered andirons.
From Rejuvenation in Portland (503-238-1900). “We’d
been looking for big andirons for the Great Room’s
fireplace and it’s difficult to find large ones and
when you do, they’re so incredibly expensive,”
says Jones. “Then we saw these in the part of
Rejuvenation where they sell salvaged house
parts, and they were marked $ 35. We said,
‘Those look like they might fit in the fireplace,’
and we nabbed the pair quick.”
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Room, it wasn’t as high a priority for the
couple as having the patio, which three
sides of the house wrap around, at ground
level rather than looming above the forest
floor. In fact, the couple could be sitting
in a house that was 8 feet higher had they
not wanted to be able to walk off their
patio into the woods.
“The first time we walked the property, it was covered in Scotch broom
that was so high that you couldn’t see
over it as you were walking up,” says
Schons. “You couldn’t really tell that
there were great views from up
here. So Mary and I climbed a
tree and we said, ‘This is awesome. We’ve got to build here!’”
The southern-most ‘cabin’ of the home
is a master suite that you get to through
a small sitting area that will morph into
a library in years to come. A large master
bedroom, walk-in closet and master bathroom complete with steamer and soaking
tub fill the wing. The bathroom’s view
of the property’s Sitka spruces—visible
through a large window and a glass ceiling—gives you a spalike soak.
“This was a stupidly expensive room!”
says Schons. “Everything about it is
expensive. It’s all natural slate and granite. The tile is heated. The seat is heated.
The roof is a commercial-grade glass. And
it’s a steam room as well. It was threequarters finished when we started talking to the steam guy. I figured we’d need
one little steam engine, but with the glass
roof, you need another steam
engine. With the square footage, we had to add another
steam engine. And then I
learned that natural stone
just sucks up the steam,
so we were up to three
steam engines. They’re in
a closet off the master closet
walk-in. Despite all that, it’s
a pretty special room. In the
summer, we open these windows and let the forest in.”
In November of 2003, they
finally broke ground after more than a
year of working on the design. “We were
big Ideas FRom A Little Cabin
When they first arrived in Pacific City, Ore., Mary Jones and Jeff Schons moved into a little
700-square-foot cabin on the Nestucca River that Schons had owned since 1984. During
the seven years that the couple lived in the 1950s-era building, they came to love many of
the dwelling’s rustic details, so much so that when it came time to design their dream home
on a hill with views of Haystack Rock, they decided to replicate some of the features from
those good-time days.
Here are some of the design details in their new home that date to the little river house.
The firewood bay that’s loadable from the front porch. “There’s a ‘big wood’ bay and a
‘small wood’ bay,” says Jones of the firewood storage compartments built into the masonry
on either side of the hearth (below). “The big wood is really heavy and we didn’t want to
have to to drag it through the house to load into the bay, so we asked Kelly to design the
porch with a small door that opens to the back of the firewood bay. We had one like that
in our little river house. It was a sentimental thing to replicate, because when Peter was a
toddler, we’d play hide and seek with him in the little river house and he liked to hide in
the wood box and crawl through the bay to the outside.”
The river sounds that fill the air near the patio. “This property isn’t as intimate with the river
as our first house, which was on the river, so to create more of a feel of water, we had our
landscaper, Bros & Hoes Landscaping Maintenance of Pacific City, create this fountain,”
says Jones of a small water feature that borders the bluestone patio. “It gives us the noise
of the river, even though the river is 90 feet below.” A switchback trail leads down to the
Nestucca River in an easy five-minute hike.
The fire ring that holds the wood in place in the firepit. The couple has a fire ring on the
patio that they like to enjoy on summer evenings (see p. 90 in “House Calls”). “It replicates
what we had in the little river house,” says Schons. “We’d sit by the river by that ring. In the
summer, there’s still a 12-knot wind out of the northwest, so by putting the house in front of it
and the outdoor living area behind it, we have some protection from the wind.”
—S.M.D.
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used to designing commercial projects
and helping other people build their
beach vacation homes, so we totally misjudged the amount of energy and time
and effort it would take to design our very
own dream home,” says Schons. “It took
us forever! We underestimated the process by 6 or 8 months. It was almost three
years from when we sold our house and
moved into this one.”
Vern Nix, who builds residences for the
company, served as project manager. “Current code is to withstand 90-miles-an-hour
wind and we have a high seismic code
out here, too, because we’re so close to
the beach,” he says of his construction
challenges. “Often that means you have to
put a lot of steel into the house, and then
all that steel has to be covered because
nobody wants to look at raw steel when
they’re inside their house. The living and
dining room connections turned out well;
I like how we made the hidden connections. Some of those beams, for example,
have steel mortised into the beams.”
COASTAL LIVING AGREES WITH THE
former Portlanders, who start each
day by taking Sophie to the beach at 6
a.m. “If I were to say, ‘We’re going to the
beach,’ she’d run to the door,” says Jones.
The couple own a Dory boat—a flat-bottom boat that launches and lands on
the beach—and they take it out as often
as their schedules and the ocean allow.
Ocean crabbing and fishing will yield to
the fall chinook run before the couple
will stop using their stainless-steel fishcleaning station on the patio and hunker down in front of a roaring fire in the
Great Room’s massive hearth.
“I think it’s about right here!” Schons
says from in front of the fireplace when
asked what his favorite space in the
house is. “This whole Great Room is perfect: the fireplace . . . the way the room is
open to the floor above. It’s exactly what I
wanted it to be. You know what’s funny?
After we moved in, I bumped into one of
my friends who was at that cabin with
me when I was a boy. I told him how we’d
built our new house with a second floor
that was open on four sides to the living
space below. And he said, ‘That cabin’s
second floor wasn’t open on four sides; it
was only open on two.’”
The Architect
Kelly Edwards, Scott Edwards Architecture LLP, Portland
Years in business: 25
Years being a co-principal in own firm: 7
On view lots: “When your site is on the top of a ridge, it can be
intimidating,” he says. “You have to use the land to its maximum.
Before we built on this lot, we’d go up there and get on a ladder
or dig holes and sit in them to get to the house’s ideal elevation.”
Contact info: 503-226-3617 or [email protected]
“Even Sophie enjoys this room,”
The Builder
Vern Nix, Nestucca Ridge Development Inc., Pacific City, Ore.
Years in the trades: 24
On building a house for the company’s owners: “I want to do
a great job on any house I build, but you can’t get out of your
mind that this house is for a couple of people who’ve given a lot
of people a lot of opportunities. So, sure, it adds some pressure to
the job. Mary and Jeff are tough customers, but not in a bad way.
They know what they want—and we wanted to give it to them.”
Contact info: 503-550-9196 or [email protected]
says Jones of her master bath.
“She loves the heated floor. She
goes and lays in here while one of
us showers. I spend a lot of time
in the tub; Jeff likes to steam. The
only thing this bathroom lacks
compared to spa baths I’ve been
to is a massage table outside the
door—and a massage therapist.”
The waterproof iron-and-glass fixtures are from Hubbardton Forge.
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