Gear Loft in the WSJ: From Storage Shed to Home Sweet Home
ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN WALL STREET JOURNAL ON MARCH 18, 2021.
BY NANCY KEATES
In 2017, Leslie Garrard and Heidi Durham, both 48, decided they were spending enough time in Eastern Washington’s Methow Valley that they wanted a place to store all their sports equipment, including multiple skis, bikes, kayaks and paddle boards.
The Gear Shed is designed to hold all the family’s bikes, kayaks, paddle boards, and skis. / Photo by Benj Drummond
The couple wasn’t ready for a full-on house, since their jobs, and their 13-year-old son’s school, are in Seattle, about a four-hour drive away. The solution: A gear loft.
Fast forward to Covid, and the couple now lives about 90 percent of the time in the gear loft, using the workbench and a small table in the kitchenette as workspaces. Their son does online school in the sauna.
“It’s cool to figure out how to live on that scale at that level of detail but at the same time to give it an aesthetic quality of somewhere you just want to hang out.” - Ray Johnston
The family makes use of the ski waxing bench for working from home / Photo by Benj Drummond