Seattle penthouse perch ‘just a jaw-dropper’
Makeover of condo on city’s waterfront accents stunning views of lake and harbour
SEATTLE— Whatever boat is afloat, if it’s on Lake Union, it’s in Darrell Jackson’s sightline. The booming Fourth of July fireworks barge. The University of Washington’s legendary crew shells. Duck Dodge racing sailboats. Work-of-art restored wooden boats. Shimmering Christmas ships. Breathtaking superyachts Vava II and Omega. Jackson’s own 23-foot Cobalt, destined for a slip below his stunning windows-to-thewater penthouse perch.
“There is a constant stream of boats all the time,” Jackson says. “I never tire of watching them sail by.”
Could be (at least partly) thanks to the perch itself, which underwent a 14-month renovation.
When he’s not in Spokane, Wash., (Jackson is semi-retired from Coeur d’Alene’s Sunshine Minting, Inc.), Jackson drops anchor at the tippy top of Union Harbor, an apartmentturned-condominium building erected quite literally on the lake in 1968.
Jackson and his wife, Ruth Gellert Jackson, inherited the two-level corner condo from her father, philanthropist and ELDEC CEO Max Gellert, after his death in 2012. Ruth died in October 2014, after the condo’s total makeover had begun, but more than a year before its completion.
“My wife and I had always planned to update the condo and move here when we retired,” Jackson says. “We were going to do a little bit here, a little bit there . . . let’s just say the scope changed.”
Jackson says it was pretty obvious pretty quickly they needed an architect to open up the 2,375-square-foot space as much as possible and “to do whatever needed to be done to accent this fabulous view.”
Ben Trogdon got that the second he walked in the fourth-floor door, at the end of a deceptively blasé long, narrow, fluorescent-y hallway.
“The location is so stunning; it’s just a jaw-dropper,” says the namesake architect of Ben Trogdon Architects. “The view is the most important. This is a one-of-a-kind building. The height on the top floor doesn’t exist anywhere else on the east side of Lake Union.”
Outside and in, every room now accents that forever view, and the lasting Gellert legacy, thanks in huge part, Jackson says, to “godsend” CiCi Pilgrim, who stepped in to help with the project after her sister Ruth’s death.
“So much of what was in Ruth’s mind had to do with her dad,” Jackson says. “So a lot of this is CiCi’s vision of what was Ruth’s vision.”
And that view — did we mention the view? — that view is a treasured heirloom, too. “It’s spectacular,” Jackson says. “I could just stay here forever and stare out the windows.”