Yarrow Point is a slender peninsula reaching into Lake Washington, just past Hunts Point and a few minutes from the 520 bridge. It sits close to everything, yet it feels remarkably secluded.

The lot offered the kind of view most people only see from the deck of a boat. It also came with a steep hillside and an aging house that would have to come down. The owners saw past both. They had bought the land to build the home they would live in for the rest of their lives, and from the beginning, everything about it would turn toward the water.

Before the house could rise, we had to understand the slope. The driveway falls steeply toward the shore, and behind the home site the land keeps climbing, so every rain sends water down toward the foundation, season after season, for the life of the house.

So the first chapter of Yarrow Point was written underground. Early on, we brought a civil engineer and a geotechnical engineer to the table with the architects, and together we planned the infrastructure that would keep this home sound for generations. A substantial retaining wall now holds the hillside behind the house. The foundation walls are sealed with a spray-on liner and drainage mat, and more drainage runs along the back of the house and beneath the slab, keeping water moving and carrying it safely away before it can settle and do harm.

Lakefront soil is rarely as stable as it appears, so the house stands on pin piles, steel posts driven down through the softer ground until they reached solid footing.

None of this appears in the photographs, but it is the reason everything else can. The deep foundation also brought an unexpected gift: a lower level with 10-foot ceilings, rare for a basement, which gives the entire floor the proportions of a main living space.

The architects were First Lamp, a firm we partner with on several projects every year. From the very first meeting, we work together as an integrated design-build team. The architects shape the vision and the poetry of the space, and we bring our perspective on cost, feasibility, and what will hold up over decades, the art of making that vision possible.

On Yarrow Point, the vision was simple to state and demanding to achieve: every important room should face the lake.

It does. The primary bedroom, the kitchen, and the dining room all look out across the water, and on the lakeside the house becomes essentially a wall of glass. From almost anywhere inside, the view is present, shifting with the hour and the season.

You enter Yarrow Point from the top floor, and the first thing you see is the staircase.

It curves down through the house with no posts beneath it, entirely self-supporting, so the space below stays open and unbroken. A glass railing traces the curve from top to bottom, and each tread holds a fine line of LED light. At night, the whole stair glows.

The staircase was built by Skonsel, a Midwest firm that specializes in custom curved stairs. It was fabricated off-site, shipped to Washington, and then assembled and finished in place. Getting it into the house was a project of its own; it arrived heavy and unwieldy, and the installation called for real ingenuity. Then came the finer work. Any builder knows how unforgiving curves can be. Every pane of glass had to sit exactly right, and the railing had to align flawlessly from the top floor to the bottom. It is many small details, each resolved with care, that make a staircase like this one remarkable, and it is exactly the kind of challenge our team loves.

A few steps from the entry, the powder room offers a surprise. A vivid tile mosaic rises behind the sink, and a fabric chair in a saturated hue sits in the corner. Powder rooms invite a little daring, and this one embraces it, a bold first impression just inside the front door.

The kitchen is quiet by design. There are no visible pulls or handles; the cabinets open with a push latch, so every surface stays clean and uninterrupted. On one side, the room opens to the living space and, beyond it, to the lake.

What you don’t see is the second kitchen.

Behind a pocket door sits a fully equipped prep kitchen. When the owners entertain, the work of the evening happens back there, where caterers can move freely out of sight. The main kitchen stays immaculate, and the gathering stays where it belongs, in front of the glass.

Overhead, the ceiling lifts into a softly backlit cove. It rises only a foot or two, yet the light draws the eye upward and gives the room a sense of height, open without ever feeling cavernous.

Yarrow Point is a fully integrated smart home, and the owners wanted lighting that could do far more than switch on and off.

Light is layered throughout: beneath the cabinets, along the coves, and in slim strips set into the length of each ceiling beam. The fireplace is clad in stone that rises all the way to the ceiling, and that stone is backlit, so after dark a warm glow rakes across its texture.

Together these sources create a soft, layered ambiance for the evening. The owners can shift the color as well, for a holiday or a celebration, giving them a canvas to play with in their own home.

From the living room, a folding glass wall gathers to one side, and the boundary between inside and out simply disappears.

The Pacific Northwest rewards those who can be outdoors when it rains. Yarrow Point has decks on two levels, both covered and both warmed by heaters set into the ceiling, so the owners spend much of the year outside, well beyond the summer months, taking in the lake and the grounds around them.

Down by the water sits a swim spa, part hot tub and part lap pool, with a current strong enough to swim against. On quieter days, it is simply a place to sit back and watch the light change across the lake.

Like many Eastside homeowners, the owner works at Microsoft, and he wanted his home to reflect the cutting edge. That ambition led us to the Tesla Solar Roof, and Yarrow Point became home to one of the first in the state.

Most solar is an addition: panels mounted on racks above an ordinary roof, looking every bit like an afterthought. The Tesla Solar Roof is different. Its solar cells are built into the roof itself, sealed within tiles of tempered glass, with no second layer and no hardware on top. The roof becomes an integrated power plant.

Active solar tiles and standard tiles sit side by side, indistinguishable from the ground. The surface reads as a single clean, dark plane against the sky, which suits a modern house and suits a view this good, because nothing on the roof competes with it. The glass tiles are engineered for the weather a western Washington roof sees every year, built to stand up to high winds and heavy rain.

Our team worked alongside a specialized installation crew from Tesla to bring it all together. Every tile feeds an integrated system, with an inverter and charger that turn sunlight into supplemental power for the home, and the long summer days of the Northwest do much of the work.

From the street, it simply looks like a beautiful roof. That is exactly what it was designed to do.

The primary suite occupies the top floor, where the view is at its most expansive. A Juliet balcony opens toward the water, and a two-way fireplace passes through the wall between bedroom and bath, so a single fire warms both rooms.

The bath is a study in stone. It rises from the floor and wraps the walls, chosen as much for its ease as for its beauty. Above the tub, a single window holds the lake like a painting. With the fire glowing through from the bedroom, the room feels less like a bathroom than a private spa, a world apart from the city just across the water.

The owners were nearing retirement when they began, and they meant to stay. This was the house they would grow older in, and they wanted it to welcome them at every stage of life.

That wish shaped one of the most thoughtful decisions in the home: hidden within its walls is an elevator.

Because the house is entered from the top floor, every trip to the main living spaces or down to the water would otherwise mean a trip down the stairs. The elevator keeps the entire house open to its owners, whatever the years may bring, and gives them a quiet peace of mind.

An elevator is not something one simply adds. Its engineering begins at the foundation. At Yarrow Point, the concrete beneath the elevator was poured deeper and carefully waterproofed, and additional framing was built in to support it. Retrofitted into an existing home, an elevator can be costly and disruptive; planned from the start, it becomes a seamless part of the house.

It is a feature we are building into more and more homes on the Eastside, particularly in communities like Yarrow Point, Medina, and Bellevue, where families are planning to stay for the long run.

From design through construction, the homeowners were part of every chapter. Both were closely involved and brought a strong eye for design, working side by side with our team and the architects from the first sketches to the final finishes.

By move-in day, the house was unmistakably theirs. Years later, they still graciously open their door so we can share it with families imagining a home of their own.

Some homes are made to impress on a first visit. This one was made for the thousandth morning, coffee in hand, the lake still and silver beyond the glass.

The goal is to keep water moving. At Yarrow Point, that meant a spray-on liner and drainage mat on the foundation wall, drainage along the back of the house, and additional drainage under the slab, all planned with a civil engineer and a geotechnical engineer.

It is possible, but it can be very costly. An elevator needs a deeper, waterproofed foundation beneath it and added structural framing. Planning for one from the beginning is far simpler and gives homeowners flexibility for decades.

A full working kitchen tucked behind the main one, often behind a pocket door. It lets caterers or family prepare food out of sight, so the main kitchen stays clean and open when entertaining.

Soil near the shoreline is often less stable than it appears. Pin piles are steel posts driven deep into the ground until they reach firm soil or bedrock, giving the house a solid footing. They add time and cost, but they protect the home for generations.