Novak Estate

Novak Estate is a house in Mukilteo, Washington, designed for a couple who are both athletes and podcast hosts. AVI was responsible for the interior, working inside a house whose forms were already set — angular, non-standard, and unforgiving of anything drawn in a hurry.

The brief came in one line: contemporary, bold, and built around the way they actually live. So the plan reads as a set of functions rather than a set of rooms — a room for recording, a gym, a sauna with a cold plunge beside it, a kitchen inside the bedroom. Each one is there because it gets used.

The clients named their material before anything else: white oak, in a warm honey tone. Everything else was chosen to sit next to it — black, textured plaster, stone, leather. Nothing competes, and the light is built in rather than hung: LED runs inside the niches, so the glow comes out of the joinery instead of down from the ceiling.

The stair to the lower level is where the brief shows most clearly. Most clients avoid open treads and glass, and most are talked out of them. These clients asked for exactly that, and the house is better for it — the stair reads as a frame rather than a wall, and the two levels never lose sight of each other.

The entry is generous — 340 square feet before the house asks anything of you — and it settles the language immediately. Oak underfoot, black frames, and glass where a wall would have closed the view. Nothing here is decorative; it is the same three materials that will run to the end of the house.

Past it the main floor opens in a single move. Living room, dining and kitchen share one volume, and the water is in view from all three. The plan is not square, so nothing could be repeated from a standard drawing — every built element was set out to the angle it stands in.

The kitchen is built to read as one piece. Full-height oak cabinetry runs wall to wall, which removes the need for any panelling around it, and the composition rests on two islands held in deliberate contrast — one black, one in marble. A metal hood anchors the centre and black hardware repeats through every front.

What keeps it looking that way is the room behind it. A pantry of its own takes the coffee machine, the microwave and the second dishwasher, and it is reached through a door cut into the cabinetry — so the working half of the kitchen is available without ever being on display.

In the living room the fireplace does the holding. It is finished in tile against plaster and concrete-like surfaces, and the furniture answers it in rust-toned natural leather — the one warm, worn material in a house that is otherwise exact.

The stair from here goes down to what is effectively a second house: a rec room with a cinema wall, a sauna with a shower and cold plunge beside it, a gym, a room built for recording, and four more bedrooms behind concealed doors. It is not overflow space. It is where most of the week happens.

The primary bedroom is 538 square feet and is not only a bedroom. A small kitchen area is built into the oak panelling so it disappears into the wall. The bed is custom and sits on its own podium. Behind it, a flexible zone works as a desk or a semi-bar, so coffee and work both happen without leaving the room.

A corner fireplace, finished differently from the one downstairs, gives the room a second centre. The orientation is deliberate — the long side faces the view, and the seating is turned to it rather than to the television.

The bathroom is organised around one wall of black marble with white veining, lit from below so the slab appears to stand clear of the floor. The freestanding tub is in front of it, brass fittings against the stone, and a single shelf crosses the panel. Behind that wall the closet is left open — no doors — with a semi-island for accessories and the laundry built in.

With the double doors to the bedroom open, the two rooms read as one composition and the stone carries straight across. That was the point of choosing it: the same marble returns at the fireplaces, in the kitchen, and down to the coffee tables — one material tying both levels of the house together.