A Field Guide to Seattle’s Ugliest Houses

Much has been written about the proliferation of tacky town houses and shoddy, high-priced condos in Seattle, as if they had cornered the market on bad taste. But if you actually examine our far greater supply of single-family homes, as SW has done in a far-ranging field study, that privileged ideal falls victim to a less flattering taxonomy. Just as an entomologist pins beetles in a display case, so can we also delineate and describe the varied and uniquely hideous species of ugly Seattle houses, as follows below with selected illustrations.

The FAR-monster

Floor-area ratio (FAR) relies on arcane formulas best understood by architects, rocket scientists, Mensa members, Charles Mudede, and planners at Seattle's Department of Planning and Development (or DPD, an acronym that will recur maddeningly below). The easiest way to understand FAR is that, whatever the size lot next to you, your neighbor has got way, way too much FAR—and you should probably place an anonymous call to the DPD to get his ass investigated.

The classic monster house or "megahouse" is bloated with FAR. What was once a cute, 1,000-square-foot Wallingford bungalow is scraped to the foundation, has its basement excavated for wine cellar and home theater, then vomits itself perpendicularly toward the sky with nary an eave, taper, gable, dormer, or softening of right angles. The FAR-monster is a math-fed beast. Each square inch is justified by lot size and the DPD's maximum permitted height. To build anything less would be to leave money on the table!

It's all about numbers, the owner reasons: Since I paid and am being taxed so much on this land, I might as well max out my investment, balloon my mortgage, and supersize my potential return when I eventually sell. If the neighbors complain, if small children are frightened, if the designer chickens owned by the lesbians next door stop laying eggs, to heed those concerns would allow them to steal my money! They would be drinking my milk shake! Drinking it up!

There is no architectural hallmark of the FAR-monster, no signature style. Its aesthetic is size—an SUV without wheels, a venti coffee without froth, a galvanized bucket brought to the all-you-can-eat buffet. Some allude to Federal or Tudor with appliqué bricks or turrets; some try to pass off painted C-board as international modernist; a few even belt themselves with tiny porches (sized to park a few strollers) in a gesture toward the Craftsman houses whimpering next door. But no one is fooled. The FAR-monster cannot change its stripes—or rather, the spreadsheet columns and rows that constitute its genetic code.

The Misfit

Listening to the Tom Waits song "What's He Building?" will help you understand the Misfit. The owner—and it's always a he—never comes out in daylight hours. He might've built the house himself, or inherited it from a crazy old bachelor uncle who never married and shot at the neighborhood dogs with a BB gun. No one knows his name. There is no mailbox, only a shattered, rotting timber where it used to stand—as if something explosive came by first-class delivery.

The Misfit itself is the opposite of contextual or background architecture. It's the glaringly broken tooth in a row of stucco Alki bungalows or manicured Maple Leaf Tudors or tidy View Ridge ranchers. It's the house where your real estate agent steps on the gas, redirecting your attention to the cute little number on the other side of the street. It's the address where the UPS man, newspaper boy, and doorbelling Mormons won't enter the yard. It's the property where even neighborhood dogs won't go to crap or pee, as if some instinctual, self-preserving part of their canine brain keeps them away.

If the neighbors are shingled, the Misfit is tin. If others on the block favor an indigenous color scheme of sand, salal, and fir, the Misfit will be industrial orange, with glossy black trim. If your community association favors tasteful, ecumenical holiday decorations in December, the Misfit inexplicably lights up during solstices and foreign holidays. If cedar siding surrounds the Misfit, that house is clad in crumbling asbestos shingles whose particles whirl and eddy in the wind. And no matter what the prevailing taste of the neighbors, the Misfit's design always incorporates concrete blocks, blue tarps, garages converted to living quarters (or home laboratories; no one is certain which), corrugated plastic paneling, uncovered tar paper, uncovered, untreated plywood, and old Ron Paul yard signs.