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The fine craftsmanship of Perpetually Devastated played out in a 1968 Overlander.

Art and Craft in an Airstream

A couple creates one-of-a-kind Airstream interiors in Southern Oregon written by Melissa Dalton photography by Bethany Williams With a business name like Perpetually Devastated, Parker Bolden and Bethany Williams are used to explaining the meaning. “We are sensitive people and find the state of our world depressing sometimes,” said Williams. “People hate others just for being different. There’s environmental degradation, extractive capitalism, the list could go on and on. You could just be really sad. It’s all perpetually devastating. And yet, you have to find a way to make yourself happy, to make things just a little bit better if you can.” One of the ways that the two have done that is by renovating Airstream trailers alongside a talented crew at their shop in Southern Oregon. Each project starts with a trailer that has solid bones, which they use as a base to rebuild the interior from scratch, from…

Natural fibers and warm colors follow the aesthetic of the Columbia Gorge below this Mosier home.

Natural Beauty

A house in Mosier captures everything special about the Columbia River Gorge written by Melissa Daltonphotography by Christopher Dibble Richard Brown is no stranger to working on esteemed sites. Consider the architect’s deft addition to a 1949 Pietro Belluschi house in Oak Grove—Belluschi being perhaps Oregon’s most famous modern architect and known worldwide. But when the owners of 10 acres near Mosier in the Columbia River Gorge reached out, it wasn’t an existing house that struck awe in Brown. It was the land. “My first thought was, ‘This is a rare opportunity for us to work with a really beautiful site,’” said Brown. “I felt a great responsibility to be respectful, in order to take advantage of as many aspects of it as we can.” The Columbia River Gorge is indeed dramatic: a canyon 80 miles long and 4,000 feet deep in spots, cut by the Columbia River and marking…

Chris Martini's first wood-burning hot tub on Mount Hood

DIY: Wood-Fired Hot Tubs

Photography by Northwest Timber Tubs A few years ago, Chris Martini’s friends asked for help with a project. They had bought property at the base of Mount Hood and wanted to build a hot tub there. The only catch? The tub needed to be completely off-grid and fueled by a wood-fired stove. Having extensive experience as a carpenter, and most recently managing production for a teardrop trailer company for five years, Martini thought the project sounded like a fun design challenge. “They sent me pictures of some fairly crude designs from the internet that they had found. Real simple stuff of an old tub with a copper coil set-up on the outside,” said Martini. “But the issue with that set-up is that it takes forever to heat up.” Martini got to designing and building, not only the tub, but the platform beneath it, the stove insert, and a retractable roof…

Designer Max Humphrey pulled ocean and sage colors from Manzanita and found the tile to make it work.

Three Bathrooms, One Designer

Max Humphrey shares three very different bathroom designs for inspiration written by Melissa Dalton photography by Christopher Dibble Considering everything Max Humphrey has done before starting his Portland-based interior design business—including working in television and film production in Los Angeles, and touring the United States and England as a bassist in a punk band—perhaps it should come as no surprise that he has this advice for prospective bathroom remodelers. “Bathrooms don’t need to be neutral and boring,” Humphrey said, who is also the author of the recent style guide Modern Americana. The following three projects show us how that’s done. Manzanita: A nature-inspired main suite For a top-to-bottom gut remodel of a 1978 house in Manzanita, Humphrey worked with the Portland architecture firm Beebe Skidmore to swap out the home’s dated finishes for a beach cabin aesthetic that takes inspiration from the immediate natural surroundings. “An Oregon beach is very…

Connie Migliazzo and husband renovated the pool area with textural ferns while keeping it simple for many uses.

Bit-by-Bit

A landscape architect takes it slow redesigning her yard to maximize enjoyment in the creative process written by Melissa Daltonphotography by Elijah Hoffman Passing by mounds of Mexican feather grass rippling in the breeze, the crunch of decomposed granite under foot, there is a feeling of calm walking up to Connie Migliazzo’s house in Southwest Portland. That’s relatively new for the 1953 abode, which before, had a yard as common as they come: lawn, and more lawn at the front, side and back. “There were some intermittent random plants, a crumbling lava rock wall, but mostly just lawn,” Migliazzo said. “I wanted to do my own thing.” Migliazzo, a landscape architect and founder of the firm Prato, relocated with husband, Jonathan Kadish, a data scientist, from Berkeley, California in 2018. Ever since, they’ve been fixing up the interior of the Mid-century home with Helland Architecture—“It wasn’t a cool Mid-century before,”…

On a forest clearing outside of Tillamook, a couple creates its own Oil Can Henry’s architectural style.

A Cabin State of Mind

A photographer and an architect, friends and neighbors, craft a small retreat in the woods outside Tillamook written by Melissa Dalton photography by Shawn Records Both Shawn Records and his wife, Jenny, grew up in Idaho with a “mountain place” in their families. His grandparents had a little trailer at Lake Cascade, while Jenny’s parents built a cabin close to Lake Fork, ten miles south of McCall. Around 2013, the now Portland-based couple—he’s a photographer, and she’s a librarian—started looking for a little extra land of their own to continue the tradition and build a new place for a new generation of the family, said Records. They started scouting out the Oregon Coast, but contrary to so many buyers, didn’t necessarily want to be on the water. Then they found a seven-acre forested parcel outside Tillamook, with a meadow clearing, salmonberry thickets, and deer trails carved through groves of alder…

DIY Treehouse

DIY: Backyard Treehouse

Photography by Christopher Dibble The beginning of Grey Shaeffer’s treehouse adventure was as a child at her parents’ farm in Forest Grove. Her father built an A-frame treehouse that spanned two trees, and as an adult, Shaeffer made some updates to the original. “I was 19, and I didn’t want to move back into the house because I’d gone to school overseas, so I moved into the tree house,” recalled Shaeffer. “So, I actually remodeled that tree house and lived in it, with plumbing and everything.” Years later, as a designer and founder of Willa Work, Schaeffer was building an Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) in her Portland backyard, and it was a natural decision to add a treehouse, using leftover building materials from the larger project. “I wanted a treehouse for me and my kids,” said Schaeffer, who fashioned hers into an office space, but also saw it get used…

This interior space in Michael McCulloch’s pavilion brings together an absence of adornment and peaceful views of the outdoors.

DIY: Meditation Space

In 2006, Michael McCulloch completed a pool pavilion on the Portland property that the architect shares with partner, Maryellen Hockensmith. From the start, this wasn’t just any pool pavilion, as the site is an 80-acre working lavender farm that hosts a 1980 house designed by famed Oregon architect Pietro Belluschi. “We designed [the new pavilion] intentionally to be like a piece of the original building broken off and put out in the garden,” said McCulloch. The resulting structure is multi-functional, with two rooms that can be closed from one another and a bathroom in the middle. The front “expansive” section of the pavilion captures the site’s far-reaching views, as well as the nearby pool, while the rear “introspective” room has three walls composed of sliding glass doors that frame the natural crawl of the surrounding land. The entire building is constructed of Port Orford cedar, which was chosen “because it’s…

Oversized pendants with an open-weave pattern complement a leathered amazon granite slab on the island in this Bend kitchen.

Artistic Accents

Two kitchen remodels stay true to their owners’ artsy backgrounds written by Melissa Dalton Bend: For a stylist, a kitchen curated like a killer outfit For every kitchen remodel, Sarah Westhusing takes as many cues as possible from the clients to shape the new design, from learning their favorite hotels, to whether they can abide counter clutter. When the interior designer began working with Beny and Leslee Rabuchin on their Bend home in 2021—he’s a mortgage broker and she’s a stylist—Westhusing immediately noticed Leslee’s artistic flare. “She always has the most fun and playful outfits and hats,” said Westhusing. But the couple’s home, a ranch built in 1984, “and not a cool 1950s ranch,” noted Westhusing, was not fulfilling Leslee’s innate sense of style. Functionally, the kitchen layout needed some tweaks. A dropped ceiling and too many upper cabinets made it feel dark, and an L-shaped counter effectively cut off…