"My dream was to be able to fly-fish in my backyard."
Realizing that dream turned out to be a lengthy and fraught process for Mark Steilen, who grew up in Spokane but spent his career in Hollywood as a writer, director and producer. Though he has many credits, including Will, Shameless and Mozart in the Jungle, he's perhaps best known in his hometown as a writer and producer of the movie Tag, based on the real-life story of a group of friends in Spokane who have played an annual, and epic, game of tag for more than 40 years.
Befitting a storyteller from the entertainment industry, the saga of Steilen's renovation of a dilapidated property with Spokane River frontage has plenty of drama.
ACT 1
The house was built in 1928 in the rather severe Brutalist style. Its original owner made his fortune in home heating oil but lost his wife at a relatively young age. "The story was that he was so distraught that he built this and basically stepped in and didn't come out," Steilen says. The home's peculiar set of two front doors led neighbors to believe it was a duplex, though in fact the smaller door provided a way for the owner to limit contact with the outside world: A cook would enter the small kitchen, prepare meals, pass them through a window into the formal dining room, leaving the owner to dine alone.
After the original owner died, the home deteriorated, eventually inhabited by squatters as a legal dispute over ownership dragged on. Steilen, who splits his time between Southern California and Spokane, was always on the lookout for close-in river frontage property in his hometown. He got a tip on a house that was "an incredible deal" from his friend, Jess Walter. Steilen first viewed the interior on a video that friend, and future neighbor, Nance Van Winckel shot and sent to him while he was living in New York City, working with a group of writers on the series Divorce for HBO. Finding the house was a bright spot during a rough patch, as he was actually going through a divorce of his own at the time.
"So I'm celebrating in the writer's room in New York, and they go, 'What are you so happy about?'" Steilen says. He showed the British writers the video, "And they're like, 'Christ, you're happy about that?' They thought it was insane."
ACT 2
When Steilen eventually toured the house in West Central Spokane, it was in worse shape than the video revealed. Amid all the structural issues, "here was an old mirror and someone in the dust had, with a finger, written REDRUM," Steilen says, still somewhat incredulous years later. A bullet hole was evidence of previous gun play.
Undeterred, the home's new owner saw great potential in the near-ruin. Most of all, he just wanted to maximize the property's incredible 180-degree view of the curving Spokane River out the back of the home.
"I had ideas, and I just drew them like a child... I sent [them to] an engineer, and I said, 'OK. Here's the concept. We're literally going to take a saw, and we're going to cut the concrete," he says, referring to the entire back wall of the main floor of the cinder block house. "And then we're going to put trusses in to elevate the whole house. Can we do this?'"
As it turned out, owing to the home's unique, unusually large and heavy cinder block construction, it was possible, though there were plenty of obstacles ahead.
It took more than a year for the project to even get underway, somewhat inauspiciously aided by the arrival of COVID. As Hollywood shut down, Steilen found himself hanging out at home in LA with his son.
"All we did was work out in the park and stare at each other in the condo and daydream. So I said, 'Let's just go look at that house and see what we can do.'" The duo road-tripped to Spokane, set up camp in the back yard and started to plan a major home renovation in a time of acute supply chain issues.
"We made a rule: We will repurpose as much of the house as we can. That'll be part of the design puzzle. We'll try and make it beautiful out of the parts we have available... We got up every morning and said, 'What next?' And we just started taking the house apart."
ACT 3
All the removed elements — even nails pulled from salvaged wood — were carefully sorted and stored in the garage. More than four months in, the biggest test still remained: cutting off the back of the house. A couple of contractors took a look at the job and immediately declined. Steilen worried he'd have to bulldoze the whole project. Gary Schimmel, a longtime friend, suggested the despairing Steilen show the house and explain his plan to Jeff Yarnell, a "real jack-of-all-trades and master of even more," Steilen says.
"Jeff comes to me and says, 'I don't know if it's gonna stand up when we cut it. If it torques, the whole house is going to go down.'"
But Yarnell was willing to try, and after shoring up the roof with poles, a crew from Spokane Concrete Cutting wielded the giant saw, slicing into the back of the house. The assembled team counted down and ever-so-carefully, in perfect coordination, pushed the freed blocks out. "We had the door open, we were ready to run," says Steilen. Debris landed with a giant thud in the backyard.
The structure held, revealing the sweeping river vista.
"By the end of the day, it's a whole different world. How cool is that?" Steilen marvels.
ACT 4
Standing in the living room in February, the house is nearing completion. Steilen recounts stories of all the craft and tradespeople — a unique group even a casting agent couldn't have dreamed up — who made the project possible over those years. He credits Yarnell with directing the project, "It was Jeff who really built the whole thing, while I stood next to him and took orders for how long to cut the two by fours."
Then, there's his partner, Tricia Connor Jackson — "Before I'd ask Jeff whether any design idea was possible, I'd run it by Tricia... She's got these killer green eyes that would suddenly go a little squinty if she didn't like something and that was a dead give-away."
Then there was the HVAC specialist, John — "He's a sculptor, but you can't make a living sculpting" — who created a unique solution for necessary but potentially unattractive return vents. The unknown carver of a beautiful wood front door from Tuscany that made its way to the house via the Ugly Duck in Spokane. Marcel, the Romanian immigrant who installed that door in perfect balance and did much of the finish millwork in the house. "He's a musician — a lot of musicians end up in specialty carpentry. He can sing like a god... like he could be performing in Le Caveau in Paris."
The materials, too, have stories. The living room's floor-to-ceiling wood paneling was crafted from reclaimed fir roof trusses, with some of the 2-inch-by-10-inch boards stretching to 20 feet in length.
"These are invaluable — you can't get these. We took them apart and stacked them so they could air dry for a whole year," says Steilen, who was enthralled by the wood's beauty. "I'd sand them to just the degree that I thought would be right... I wanted them to be real. You see all the hammer [marks], the nail holes, everything."
Terra-cotta tile flooring, with its authentic worn patina, was preserved in the entry and on the stairs. The original wood flooring remains on the main floor, supplemented by replacement boards scavenged from the lower level. (Steilen even tracked down the firm that supplied the original flooring to order replacement boards for the lower level.)
Mostly intact underneath an unsightly faux mantelpiece, the fireplace surround was carefully restored by a skilled local mason, its imperfections purposefully left unaltered.
Even the furnishings hold meaning. A wide and well-worn leather sofa — "the greatest napping couch in the world" — arrived as a gift from a friend in NYC. There's a perfect spot for playing guitar by the window, and a gracious large table for gathering.
And that singing carpenter? He brought out the whole neighborhood. "People would hear the music, so they would pop in," Steilen says. "My next door neighbor Rik walks over and says, 'I'll bring my piano.' This young couple across the street, Chris and Tracy, have these beautiful voices. So we have an actual neighborhood band. We have a blast... This neighborhood's just filled with really wonderful, interesting people."
There are animal visitors too. "The largest buck mule deer nested out there last year – his whole family's there, and my dog would go out and lay down with them." Wild turkeys line up on the edge of the bluff, daring each other to be the first to take off.
After five long years working on his fifth home renovation, Steilen looks back with gratitude for the distraction that the complicated project provided during a tumultuous time, and greater still for how the house, with its blunt and utilitarian facade, has turned out. "There's a little James Bond vibe to it when you open the door and go, 'Oh, didn't expect that. That's something special.'"
