We Bought Land!

Staying Island Curious

Alex is part fish. He has always wanted to live near water — and after years of trips to the islands, he started running the numbers. We spent a vacation wandering through villages and townhomes and one strange little house with a leaking roof, and we tried, in our way, to imagine a life there. The math was complicated. The distance was bigger than the math. Eventually life got busy, we put the dream in a drawer, and we went back to summer in the Pacific Northwest.

But the drawer wasn't really closed.

Staying "Island Curious" helped us get a lot more clear about what was important. What Hawaii had done was teach us what we wanted: somewhere with water and view, somewhere we could go to rather than just live in, somewhere that felt — and this was the word we kept coming back to — like a place rather than a house. When we let ourselves look closer to home, Whidbey Island appeared like it had been waiting. Not too close to the city, not too far. Developed enough to have a grocery store within five minutes; wild enough to feel like an exhale. The Goldilocks version of the dream.

We assumed we would buy a house. We ended up buying land.

The pivot happened slowly. Nothing we walked through quite fit — every house was someone else's idea of a house, and we kept finding ourselves more interested in the garden rather than the kitchen… Alex got obsessed with the Island County geo map, scrolling through parcels late at night the way other people doom-scroll. A friend who happens to be our builder who has a family home on the island gave us the piece of advice that changed everything: focus on the west side, for the sunsets over the Olympics. We took their word for it.

We learned the geography of the island the way you learn a face. The naval air base and its noise zones — Alex, a pilot, thought the EA-18s were cool the first time and would have lost his mind by the third. The distance from the ferry, which matters more than you think, when you've disembarked and just want to get to your views! The microclimate of the Olympic rain shadow, which gives the central part of the island a kind of weather you'd expect somewhere drier and sunnier than the PNW (seriously…half the rainfall of Seattle!!). We wanted three to ten acres. We wanted enough cleared space to build, enough forest to wander into. We wanted a well, power to the road, a driveway already cut. We wanted the bones.

What we found was better than the bones. We found the view.

The day we walked onto this property, the list got quiet.

It was west-facing. It was on a high bluff. It had the magic ratio — open meadow where a house, art studio, longhouse/workshop, and garden could go, a forest where a campsite might live, an edge where you could build a treehouse, and views for days — a place to sit together with coffee (or wine) and not move for hours.

We bought it in November.

The day of closing was grey-bright, the way fall days around here can be — flat light, enormous sky full of stars. We drove straight from the city to the land. We opened champagne and celebrated with friends. We stood at the edge of the bluff. We looked west.

We had a road in. No water on. No power on. We had no idea what we were doing. What we had was the bluff, the trees, the view, and each other.

We're calling it Greyhaven. We'll tell you how the name found us another time.

For now — we bought land.