The building on the corner of Ninth and Westlake avenues doesn’t exist yet. When it is finished, a year
from now, it is going to be a curved, glassy, 19-story condominium
tower called Enso, which is the name of a Zen Buddhist symbol for the
perfect meditative state. But right now, it’s just a few stories of
dark, naked structure with the wind blowing through it.
The 135 condos in the building went on sale in mid-2006. The
smallest start at $460,000 and the penthouses start at $1.9 million.
It’s hard to sell anything sight unseen—let alone a luxury
condo—and if you’re going to spend $460,000 on a home, you have
to be able to imagine what it’s like inside. That’s why there are model
kitchens, model bedrooms, model bathrooms, and an array of “finishes”
for every room in every condo. But this is a city that prides itself on
views, and modeling a view from a room that isn’t built yet is far more
complicated.
Two summers ago, in 2006, Fred Cavazos showed up at the Enso site,
which was just a parking lot at the time, with an 18-foot-long helium
blimp. Cavazos is the owner of Above the Rest Aerial Photography. The
blimp is white with red fins and has “atrphoto.com” printed in black letters on
its side. He attached a digital camera to the blimp and unspooled it up
into the air like a kite. He had made markings
on the tether to
correspond with each of Enso’s planned floors. Cavazos maneuvered the
blimp by hand and the camera, when the wind conditions were right, took
dozens of pictures in every direction at each level.
That took the better part of a workday, and then Cavazos yanked the
blimp back down to earth. He drove back to his low, viewless house in
southwest Seattle and spent the next two days altering the photographs
to even out the light and digitally stitching together a 360-degree
panorama for every floor’s view. Now those photos are on display at the
South Lake Union Discovery Center. The Discovery Center is a large,
handsome showroom full of high-tech propaganda for the growing
neighborhood. A metal dog named Slupy who has TV cameras for eyes, for
instance, “reads” the script that hangs in front of him, explaining
that dog-friendly South Lake Union has 379 telephone poles and 46 fire
hydrants.
The views that Cavazos made are on big, flat touch screens mounted
slightly above eye level. You click on an individual floor and then
drag the panorama all the way around with your finger. The views are a
little funny, because their perspective is straight ahead, rather than
up and down, as if you’re envisioning wearing a neck brace while
standing on your future balcony. From the top floors of Enso, it looks,
magically, as though the ground doesn’t exist. Everything is treetops.
This is about seeing the future, even if it’s underwhelming: From the
middle floors, you’re stuck with the giant jumping-whale mural on the
La Quinta Inn next door. (What’s really underwhelming, almost comically
so, are the eyesore views of parking lots and rooftop appliances from
the six stories of the unfinished Veer Lofts, which are clickable on a
different screen at Discovery Center.)
The truly enveloping experience at Discovery Center is the model
condo in the back, advertising another neighboring building. In the
dining room, where the table is set for four, one whole wall is a
floor-to-ceiling “window” showing a time-lapse video of views. These
views are different from Cavazos’s panoramas. “Views are an
approximation,” the small print on a placard reads, going on to explain
that these photos are taken “from a rooftop perspective with various
camera lenses and focal lengths.” This is, in other words, a fantasy of
what your naturally occurring broadcast at various times of day would
be: boats gliding by, shadows climbing up the sides of other towers at
sunset, guests up and down the nearby Westin Hotel towers snapping
their curtains open and closed.
The developer of all those buildings is Vulcan, the
many-limbed company owned by Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen that’s
responsible for condo towers popping up all over the South Lake Union
neighborhood. And it’s not just South Lake Union. The Seattle
Times declared 2007 “The Year of the Condo,” and estimated that
something like 3,000 units were in development. There are imagined
properties for sale all over town.
Views are big business, and marketers go to great lengths to frame
and sell them. The summer before Cavazos was out shooting Enso with his
kite-blimp, a miniature,
remote-controlled helicopter came all the
way from Chicago to buzz around above a pile of dirt at Olive Way and
Eighth Avenue, where the 39 stories of Olive 8 would eventually begin
to rise. Leslie Williams, head of Williams Marketing Inc. and the
epitome of the successful entrepreneurial real-estate marketer in
Seattle, is the one who hired the helicopter, which came with a trained
pilot. The Chicago company SkyPan invented and patented the helicopter
for the sole purpose of shooting views that don’t exist yet, because at
certain heights, blimps are unsteady, and in certain urban zones,
cranes are too unwieldy.
Before Olive 8, Williams, who has been in business here since 1977,
did the marketing for Cristalla, another Cadillac of a condo tower just
a few blocks away. For that building, she did something almost unheard
of outside of commercial real estate in Seattle: She negotiated a deal
to buy the air over the building to the west of Cristalla, to make sure
that building never got any taller. That way she could promise the
views that she was marketing. “It was worth lots of millions, but it
was worth it to us,” she said. “It happens in commercial real estate
all the time in Seattle, but this is the first time, as far as I know,
that it has happened in residential here.”
That’s called buying air rights, which means what it sounds like.
You literally buy emptiness. But it’s emptiness that’s full of value,
like every view.
Seattle is mad for views, probably because we have so many of
them. It may just be the best view city in the country. There’s Puget
Sound, Lake Union, Lake Washington, the Olympic Mountains, the Cascade
Mountains, Mount Rainier, numerous islands, and two glittering skylines
(Seattle and Bellevue). In the database that real-estate agents use,
the Multiple Listing Service (MLS), there are 13 possible categories of
views that apply to properties in Seattle: bay view, city view, jetty
view, mountain view, partial view, sound view, territorial view, canal
view, golf-course view, lake view, ocean view, river view, strait view.
Some of these are virtually meaningless. Take “territorial.” “Unless
you’re living in a windowless hovel, you are looking out on some kind
of territory,” said John L. Scott agent Sarah Rudinoff.
Modern Seattle was founded on the appeal of its hills, valuable for
their vantage points. Starting in about 1900, Seattle was advertised as
a city of “seven hills,” in comparison to the seven hills of Rome.
The truth is, “The number is arbitrary and does not accurately
describe Seattle’s topography of numerous hills, ridges, and bluffs
left behind by the retreat of the Vashon Glacier some 14,000 years
ago,” according to HistoryLink. “Regardless, the Roman allusion
apparently helped to attract land buyers and new families to the
growing ‘Queen City of the Pacific Northwest’ (another real-estate
slogan coined in 1869 by promoters based in Portland, Oregon).” Nobody
even knows what the original seven hills were supposed to be. There are
more than seven hills here. (The highest point in the city is the top
of West Seattle, at 522 feet above sea level.)
Real-estate agents can easily rattle off view neighborhoods:
“There’s Green Lake, Phinney Ridge, Fauntleroy, Admiral, Belvedere,
Sunset Hill, Magnolia, Queen Anne, Belltown, Capitol Hill, Leschi,
Madrona, Mount Baker, Madison Park, Montlake, Laurelhurst, Windermere,
Eastlake, View Ridge, even parts of Greenwood,” Windermere agent Alex
Eckardt said, off the top of his head. “There’s probably more than
that.”
Real-estate agents will tell you that the most valuable views are
the ones that wrap around the main floor of a house and include as many
natural elements as possible. Water views are notoriously coveted, but
even within that category there are lake people and sound people. And
then there are the Mount Rainier people.
“I think Rainier is the best view—it’s like Fujiyama to the
Japanese,” said Bill Bain, a leading light of architecture in Seattle
for more than 50 years (his father cofounded NBBJ). “But the sound, the
lake—we’ll take anything. Views are a huge commodity here.
Everybody thinks they have to have a great view here, usually except
for the people who were born here.”
Leslie Williams not only hired the helicopter to take the
view pictures for Olive 8, she also fell for her own marketing. She
bought an Olive 8 condo with a 180-degree view of Elliott Bay, Lake
Union, and downtown.
“I’m from Iowa, and when I first toured the University of Washington
and I saw Mount Rainier at the end of the lane, I said, I’m going to
live here,” Williams said. “The views are just like a beautiful piece
of art. It brings on an emotional response.”
Sometimes it’s a crazy response. People do outrageous things for a
view.
In 2002, federal judge Jerome Farris—a senior judge on the
Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals—had his Vietnamese gardener
cut 120 trees down to the stumps in Colman Park to improve his view of
Lake Washington. He was fined a half-million dollars.
A year ago this month, thirteen 100-foot trees on Dean Overton’s
family property in West Seattle were butchered when somebody cut 20
feet off of them at the top. Overton found chopped treetops on the
ground and resting in other trees. The butcher was never caught.
Two weeks ago, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported
another case of illegal tree-cutting in West Seattle—at least 10
maples, about 25 feet high, on a greenbelt. In that story, city
arborist Mark Mead told the P-I that “we’re going to start to
see more of this as the summer heats up.”
Then there’s the highly publicized case from last year of people who
had paid top dollar for condos high in the new Cosmopolitan tower
downtown. They decided to sell them before even moving in when they
found out that a building next door that was supposed to be 13 stories
high had changed its plans and would rise 34 stories. Their views were
destroyed before they ever saw them.
It’s hard to quantify how much views are worth, especially when it’s
hard to tell what houses are worth. Across the nation, the housing
market has gone bust. Seattle has held out longer than most cities, in
large part because of phenomenal job growth through the end of 2007,
said Todd Britsch of New Home Trends, a provider of information about
local real estate. His outlook is that, in new construction, things
will only get better. “We’ve hit rock bottom,” he said.
But a report last week from the Standard & Poor’s
S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices showed the first year-to-year
decline in King and Snohomish County house prices since 1991. It was a
drop of only 1.3 percent from last January to this January, but Doug
Pedersen, publisher of the quarterly newsletter Puget Sound
Economic Forecaster, considers the overall picture gloomier. “My
sense is that prices still have a little more to go before they bottom
out, and I kind of expect prices to rise just with the inflation rate
after 2008,” he said. In other words, he doesn’t expect the market to
bounce back very quickly. Cavazos, the aerial photographer, is already
wondering whether he’s going to need to downsize the business that has
been supporting him and his wife—whether we’re in the twilight of
things like luxury-condo marketing.
In any kind of market, agents Eckardt and Rudinoff estimate that a
great view can constitute up to 20 percent of a home’s value. Real
“view homes,” as they’re called, with entire walls devoted to views,
are rare and expensive. They’re slow to sell even in a busy market,
because only so many people can afford them.
It’s obvious that views are great, but what’s so great about
them? What do you get from mountains versus water? And does owning a
spectacular view amount to privatizing it for yourself, or is it more
that you’re taking part in a shared public experience?
I wonder whether hikers are more or less likely to want views of
mountains. It seems entirely possible that the appeal of expensive
views is that they represent inaccessible spaces—places out
in the middle of the ocean or high in the air—but ones tethered
to our own dimensions. They rise from the same ground we walk on, begin
with the same shoreline where we stand and look. They’re like personal
appendages that stretch farther than we ever could, and yet they
represent forces that continue to defy us. Instead of the common wisdom
that grand views represent success, maybe they are a relief from
believing that we can do anything. Then again, only the wealthy need
that sort of relief.
An encounter with a view is visual, not participatory, like looking
at landscape art. Beginning in the 18th century, there was a cottage
industry of “view” painters—painters who made portraits purchased
by gentlemen on their travels. At home, the paintings didn’t just show
off the traveler’s sophistication; they also provided cold, damp, dim
northern homes with false windows that “looked out onto” the warmth and
light of southern climes. Seattle Art Museum has one of these paintings
on display right now, in the European art exhibition on the fourth
floor, by Luca Carlevariis, made around 1710. It depicts a storm
brewing in dark clouds above the Grand Canal in Venice, but a balmy
late afternoon hitting the side of the Doge’s Palace anyway, warming
the people strolling there.
Don’t people with spectacular views start to take them for granted,
just a little? Michael Darling, modern and contemporary art curator at
SAM, says he’s tracking himself to see if he starts to become
blasé about the lake-and-mountains view he bought two years ago
when he moved up to Seattle from L.A. For him, it’s not just a pretty
sight, but a field of depth that’s constantly shifting depending on
what the weather is doing. It works like a camera lens with a mind of
its own, fuzzing elements out of the picture and then bringing them
back as clear as can be.
It’s not just spectacular views that count. Underdog views can turn
out to mean so much. Take the view out the window in front of me right
now, as I’m writing this. I’m in my house in the Central District,
looking out the front picture window. What I see is the front yard of
the house across the street, which, instead of a lawn, is a slab of
concrete fenced in by chain link. It sounds like a sorry excuse for a
landscape, but it has animals. Several of them. Woodland-creature
types. I can make out a deer, a bear, a baby bear, two frogs, a
seagull, a pig, and two turtles. They’re garden sculptures with no
garden. An elderly black couple lives in the house. By contrast, I’ve
planted a high-maintenance number of trees and flowers over here. Every
time I look out the window I’m embarrassed by the old stereotype: Why
are white people so obsessed with lawn care?
Before the house in the Central District, we lived in a house in
Tacoma that had what real-estate agents call a “peekaboo” view of Puget
Sound (meaning we had to stand funny to see it). Before that, we lived
in a loft in Tacoma, in a building obsessed with views of Mount
Rainier, but we lived on the back side, so our big bank of windows had
a “territorial” view of an old brick wall with a giant word
spray-painted on it. The word was OPAL. That piece of graffiti figures
prominently in family photographs from that time. One day we came home
and it had been cleaned off. It had been the largest work of art we
ever owned. 
