How the Lindal Elements system and Warmmodern Living’s design and project facilitation made the seemingly impossible a reality.

In the 1980s, our client couple, purchased a 1200 square foot beach house on San Juan Island in Puget Sound. The house became the nearly weekly retreat for the parents and their two young sons.

Today, the family circle has grown from four to thirteen members, including seven grandchildren, and the weekend population of the cottage sometimes swells to twenty.

The cottage's main deck is barely twenty feet from the shore and three feet above the surface of the water. Lounging there, one has the sense of floating on a raft with an endless horizon broken only occasionally by a passing ferry and the soft sound of the water lapping up onto the shore replacing all other sounds.

This sense of tranquility is threatened when accompanied by a dozen deck-mates as is the notion of building a larger home on the water’s edge is threatened by an imminent change in the shoreline setback to 200 feet.

How did Warmmodern Living and Lindal Cedar Homes collaborate with the client to create a worthy place for the cottage and maintain its relationship to the shoreline in just a few months? Read on to learn how the process unfolded and to see the house now under construction...