American Bungalow Magazine - The Magazine published in the interest of preserving and restoring the modest American 20th Century Home, the Bungalow, and the rich lifestyle that it affords.

by David Kramer

ONE OF THE BEST THINGS about this Craftsman-inspired home, perched on a windswept bluff overlooking a secluded cove on Oregon’s central coast, is that you can appreciate its beauty long before you ever step inside. The road leading to it meanders past a vista point, then makes its way around the cove while crossing a bridge over a small gorge, affording unimpeded views of the home nearly the entire way.

“The approach to this property and that feeling of curious anticipation that you get as you see it from the road is part of what drew us to it so many years ago,” says David Eikrem. That was back in the early 1980s, when he and his wife, Pamela, would drive past the cove on trips up and down the central coast from a vacation cottage they maintained in nearby Lincoln City. The house that stood on the bluff back then was not the house that stands there today, but it was attractive enough in its magnificent setting to whet the appetites of countless travelers passing by.

“One day we drove past and I said to Pam, “I wonder if it’s for sale?” We turned off the road and pulled up to the property. Much to our dismay, there was a big sign in the front yard that read No this house is not for sale. No this house is not for rent. Don’t ask.”

Fast forward about a dozen years, to another drive down that same stretch of coast, after they had moved their primary residence from Portland to Longview, Wash. This time they didn’t see the house they had so often admired. It was gone. They drove down to have a closer look at the property, now vacant except for the chimney and the ghostly remnants of the house’s foundation, where a “For Sale” sign now stood in the yard.

They made their way to the edge of the cliff and gazed out over the ocean and the panoramic view of the graceful 1920s-era arching bridge that spans a small creek on the innermost corner of the cove. Realizing again what a special place this was, they decided to inquire about buying it. They learned that the couple who had owned the house had passed away and left it to their heirs. It sat vacant and deteriorating for several years, succumbing to the harsh coastal conditions, until it was eventually declared a hazard and taken down by the local fire department with a controlled burn.

“Without knowing whether we would ever build on the site, we just thought that since we had admired it for so long, and we now might have a chance to own it, we had to try,” Dave says. They did, and soon it was theirs.

It would be several more years before they would make the decision to replace the Lincoln City cottage with a new house on the cove. During those years, through crucial relationships they established with an architect and a stonemason working on their Longview home, they were awakened to the architecture of Charles and Henry Greene and the Craftsman aesthetic, and a vision of the unique Craftsman house that stands on their coastal bluff today began to emerge.

“LITTLE RED SHED”
In the early 1990s, Dave and his partners in their Longview dental and orthodontics practice had met with Tom Shaw, a Portland-based architect whose style and approach had made an indelible impression on Dave during their interviews in connection with the practice’s need for new offices. Although the partners decided to retain another architect instead, the two men stayed in touch.

“I told him that at some point Pam and I were going to remodel our kitchen, and when we did, we would ask him to design it.” Dave says. That project, the Eikrems’ first experience working with Shaw, expanded beyond its original scope when Dave and Pam asked Shaw to convert an existing utility room into a study and add a new corner fireplace to better reflect the era the home was built in.

Later, when they needed to replace the garage of the Longview home, they again called on Shaw. At the heart of that project was the addition of a modest, cozy room that Dave and Pam named the “Little Red Shed” after a tiny pub of the same name located at Historic Edgefield, a lodge in Troutdale, Ore. The couple had often visited the pub when they lived in Portland and drew much of the inspiration for the room from it.

The room’s most striking feature was to be a dramatic raised-hearth fireplace similar to the one in the home Dave had grown up in. He had assembled a supply of clinker bricks and sketched out a design for the fireplace when he agreed to hire Alan Bauch, a stonemason whose 20-page bid on the job—describing at great length the intricacies of the fireplace venting, the damper, specifics about the throat dimensions and how the design as a whole would allow for maximum draft—amounted, in Dave’s words, to a masterful “dissertation” on the subject of fireplace and chimney design.

As it turned out, the experience of designing and working on the Little Red Shed room in turn provided the seminal design ideas and shared experiences that enabled the Eikrems, Shaw and Bauch to become the team that would eventually create the Craftsman masterpiece on the bluff overlooking the Pacific in Depoe Bay.

Click Here For Part 2