Nearly five years ago, Kyle Renz and his childhood friend Jerod Harwood sat atop a 14-foot-tall pile of used tires on an otherwise empty lot and contemplated sweeping views of Liberty Lake.
Renz was considering buying the lot, perched on a hillside just above the lake’s shore. As teenagers growing up in Spokane Valley, Renz and Harwood regularly visited friends and spent happy hours recreating at the lake. Renz’s wife, Ashley, who spent part of her childhood in San Diego, loved the neighborhood’s coastal vibe, with its “tiny, little tight roads and no space between you and your neighbors,” Renz says.
Sitting on the tire pile, Harwood, now an architect, was immediately inspired. He drew a little sketch right there and then. “I’m definitely a pretty strict modernist, so I try to keep simple forms… I kind of set up this diagram where we had two bars with a glass connector” — as you can see on the front cover image — “and then everything else infilled from there,” he says. “I was looking at the plans the other day, and we pretty much nailed it the first time.”
For Harwood, the house was a stepping stone toward founding his own firm, a confidence-builder after the Washington State University trained architect had quit his Seattle job, “kind of without a plan,” he says. “I drew on this a little bit and then got another couple projects and then decided I could just do it on my own.” His firm, hoist., has since designed multiple single family, multifamily, commercial and mixed-use projects in Seattle, Spokane, Post Falls, Liberty Lake and Coeur d’Alene. But the house he plotted with his friend was the start of it all.
For the Renz’s, who both work remotely, it was the opportunity to see their ideas become reality. A Scandinavian aesthetic served as inspiration, with requirements for plenty of spaces for adults and kids to gather both indoors and out. And of course, the house needed to take maximum advantage of the unobstructed vista of the lake.
The family’s financial considerations would play a role as the project got underway on the rather steeply sloped, somewhat narrow infill lot. The first challenge? Getting rid of all the tires. Disposing of them cost more than $4,000. “It never ended. There were just layers and layers and layers of tires,” Renz says.
After the lot was cleared, building could begin. Being mindful of the tight-knit, well-established neighborhood, a priority was making sure that the new home fit in seamlessly. “Because we excavated down a little bit, we’re not really coming up too much above the road elevation [at the front of the house],” says Renz. And, the view of the home from the lake is similarly unobtrusive. “If you’re out on the lake, it kind of just blends itself into the hillside.”…