Avid fliers who love cars, airplanes, hangars and barns, Shawn and Sherrie Parry are no shrinking violets. "We’re both the kind of kids who were described as bulls in a china shop," said Mrs. Parry.The culmination of their interests, vision and nonconformity is a house that doesn’t look anything like the others in this quiet, lakeside neighborhood—or like most other houses, for that matter. Amid tightly spaced Nantucket-style cottages and 1950s ranches sits an 8,000-square-foot conglomeration of concrete, rusted steel and glass geometric shapes.
A heavy steel door painted glossy wasabi green swings open to reveal a 75-foot-long bridge suspended 10 feet off the lawn below, creating an inner courtyard. Along one side a few feet away is a wing resembling a railroad car, with rusty burnt orange steel and gray concrete siding. The bridge ends in a door, which opens to another narrow steel bridge, almost a catwalk, overlooking the main room below. That room is mostly bare concrete walls, concrete floors and walls of steel columns and glass windows that look out over a back yard and Lake Washington beyond. Along the ceilings runs exposed pipe that pumps in geothermal heat.