A child of Bainbridge and former Grunge musician finds comfort, quiet, and rootedness at Wintergreen Townhomes, where a neighborhood has begun to bloom.
Daniel’s neighbor at Wintergreen Townhomes, an 11-year-old girl who lives with her mother, discovered a frog among the hydrangea and azaleas planted in front of her new home and was really hoping it would come back. Daniel shared her delight so he added a little plastic frog as a good luck charm to the gift bag with a bottle of wine he had made for her mother. The new neighbors had moved in at roughly the same time and had been helping one another settle in, offering a hand with the installation of wall shelving and pooling their stud finders, ladders, and drills.
Just a month or two after purchasing his first home, Daniel is indeed settled. He painted his walls a shade of caramel, hung window blinds, and selected and arranged his curios and furniture to conjure the coziness of a hobbit home (Daniel is a huge Tolkien fan) and the Victorian vibe of a Sherlock Holmes story. The corner of the living room is a shrine to this aesthetic. Here a dark wooden bureau hosts an impressive chessboard surrounded by a stack of hardback books with antique gilt spines, stout candles atop footed brass pedestals, a moss and mushroom arrangement under a glass cloche, and a monogrammed decanter. The kitchen has a more modern take thanks to the gleaming appliances and maple cabinets, and there are quite a few new pieces in with the vintage ones. As a longtime renter Daniel had never wanted to accumulate more than he could easily move or store, and now at last, he’s putting down roots in the form of furniture.
Daniel is a pseudonym. He’s a private person and didn’t want his identity shared, but he was happy to talk under these conditions, sitting down for an interview with a sheet of notes detailing his family’s history on the island dating back to the 1930s; his housing journey in a market that does not welcome back the children of Bainbridge; and his Grunge days when he witnessed the genesis of now-famous bands and congregated with musicians in that golden haze of pre-fame and creative energy, free days, late nights, and lots of skateboarding.
“Mom grew up here basically barefoot on the beach and in the woods, and riding horses to friends’ houses. There wasn’t even a bridge yet, so you had to have a boat of some kind,” recounts Daniel. Moving to the island as a young teen after years spent visiting family here, Daniel’s island youth was a different sort of idyll. He played bass and found his home in the alternative music scene at Bainbridge high, ultimately settling after graduation in a rental across from Hockett & Olsen on Ferncliff Avenue, “one of the houses that built Grunge,” he said. Bands would practice there. Stone Gossard, who would go on to play in Pearl Jam, and Ben Shepherd, of the future Soundgarden, would frequent the house to check out the local talent and see if any up-and-coming projects would be a good fit. After Daniel and his friends and fellow musicians successfully petitioned the city to build a wooden skate ramp in Strawberry Park, the Melvins, a group from Aberdeen, would come out to the island to skate. Daniel recalled that they would bring along “this hanger-on, roadie guy, this shy rocker kid,” whose name was Kurt Cobain.
Daniel eventually moved to Seattle with friends. But each time he took the ferry to visit his parents, who still live in the Wing Point home they purchased in the late 1970s, he would inhale the air coming off Eagle Harbor and “everything from the city would start melting off of [me].” He began laying his plan to return by establishing himself with the Seattle location of a Bainbridge company and working his way up to journeyman in the union. Eventually, he secured a job on the island and found a place to rent with his brother behind Safeway, followed by a few years in the manufactured home with a shared drive his brother bought for cheap in Fletcher Bay. When his brother married, Daniel moved in with his parents, who live off social security and his father’s navy benefits. He stayed for seven years, helping his mother, 78, care for his father, who at 80 is experiencing significant health problems, all the while saving for a down payment. Daniel watched the rising market with diminishing hope but kept “socking it away.” “I felt like I was in exile,” he said, “like I was being pushed out from where I was from.”
When Wintergreen entered the market, Daniel pounced. To be able to own a home of his own, live on the island, and continue to care for his aging parents is a dream, an especially sweet one from his current bedroom where he is “lulled to sleep at night by owls hooting” from where they perch in a nearby stand of Douglas fir.