Property of Mr. and Mrs. Michael Buckley, Bellevue, Washington | architect: Paul Hayden Kirk

9/24/2025 12:32:00 PM

The bipart form the house eventually took-it is actually two houses linked by a gallery-can be attributed to Mrs. Buckley's insistence on an element of "gracious living." Both the phrase and the quotes are hers: she feels it takes canny planning to make a servantless house run both smoothly and elegantly, yet that is a way of living she believes in. The two-part plan is also explained by her complete rejection of an "all-walls-barred house [i.e., an open plan] where father simply exchanges the asphalt jungle for interminable jangle," and her sensible interpretation of a word she finds misleading-togetherness. She believes wholeheartedly in familial harmony, but notemphatically not-in what she labels with wry perception as "desperate attempts to return to the womb." There is no such desperation in the Buckley ménage. Yet, as Mrs. Buckley says, "The division of the house is only physical. Wherever we are, we are all close, night or day, inside or out, and there is an intercom system to bring every corner of the house within hearing range." The final reason that the children have their own wing, and perhaps the strongest of all, is because of their parents' faith in their brood's capacity for horse sense. Although now away at college, Galen, the oldest daughter and a wise child, has been Mother Carey in the small house long enough to set the younger children's sights in the right direction once and for all. They have earned the privilege of independence.

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Designed by Paul Hayden Kirk, the house-to look at- is an attractive, somewhat rambling structure of cedar, raised above the ground because water is so close to the surface, and set on a slight slope that descends to Lake Washington. At the lake's edge, the Buckleys have a boat dock, a boat and the dammed-up end of a brook where they used to keep Alice, a now defunct pet alligator.

The major portion of the house includes the living room, kitchen, parents' bedroom and dressing-room-bath and the family room. "We couldn't completely sever the cord," Mrs. Buckley confesses so a glass-walled gallery leads from the family room to the children's wing, on the upper floor of which are four bedrooms grouped around a common study- playroom. On the lower level of this section is a utility area (heating, laundry, storage, carport), most of it enclosed.

Officially, all of the main house except the family room is the preserve of the older generation. The family room is common ground. Family dining, as a rule, takes place there, although Dr. and Mrs. Buckley are periodically amused to dine alone and in state at the dining end of the living room. Here, too, all holidays and galas are celebrated-complete with children.