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THURSDAY, JULY 17, 2014
Vol. CXXIII, No. 137
OFFICIAL NEWSPAPER OF THE CITY OF TACOMA Devoted to the Courts, Real Estate, Finance, Industrial Activities, and Publication of Legal Notices
Published Published Since Since 1890 1890
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Shaw House
A Tacoma architect's home and idea lab could soon be a local historic landmark By Todd Matthews, Editor One recent Friday afternoon, Sharon Winters and Kendall Reid walked through their 113-year-old home near Tacoma's Proctor District and pointed out examples of what they have come to describe as 'Stanley Things.' "Stanley's personality is all over this house," said Winters. For more than 45 years, Stanley T. Shaw, the late Tacoma architect, lived in the two-story, 2,200-squarefoot home anchored at the corner of North Lawrence Street and North 25th Street. Along with his wife, Clara, Stanley raised four children in the home, which wasn't originally built by Shaw but served as a sort of laboratory for some of his architectural ideas. "The thing about Stanley was that he had this incredibly creative mind," explained Winters, a longtime Tacoma historic preservation advocate who, along with Reid, bought the home in July of 1997. "He was trying things out on his house that he couldn't necessarily do in anybody else's house." Today, Winters and Reid call those design experiments 'Stanley Things.' One example—an attic that serves as much more than storage space. First, Shaw converted it into a bedroom for his son. Then he built a skylight into the attic roof. Finally, he carved an opening into the attic floor and fitted it with a re-purposed window-turnedhatch that allowed natural light to pour in from the attic skylight and onto the second floor hallway. Add a nearly vertical wooden ladder from an old ship, and you have the perfect hideout / bedroom for any young child. "Working with those kinds of ideas, he always tried one more thing," said Reid. "I think he liked to be hands-on, especially at the prototype level. I suspect he liked to build something just to see if it would work, or how it would work." Other examples—on the second floor, a small flap door above a bathroom sink opens to a chute for dirty laundry; in the living room, a wooden grille re-purposed from an old Victrola and installed above a closet door provides ventilation for wet coats; an octagonal dining room Shaw created by adding diagonal walls at four corners (one wall opens up to reveal Clara's former sewing cabinet); a fireplace that juts out several feet from the wall and features the hand-carved inscription, Strike A Light! The Universe Is Fireproof!, a reference to the poet and editor James Russell Lowell; a complicated (and somewhat comical) system for
ABOVE: For more than 45 years, Stanley T. Shaw, the late Tacoma architect, lived in this two-story, 2,200-square-foot home anchored at the corner of North Lawrence Street and North 25th Street. Along with his wife, Clara, Stanley raised four children in the home, which wasn't originally built by Shaw but served as a sort of laboratory for some of his architectural ideas. RIGHT: One of Shaw's creative design ideas was to direct natural light through an attic skylight and onto a second-floor hallway. (PHOTOS COURTESY SUSAN JOHNSON / ARTIFACTS CONSULTING) trapping cold air from outside by way of a grate built into a window ledge, then feeding that air into a nearby radiator; Art Deco "S" monograms (for "Shaw") are carved into various places throughout the house; and an Art Deco plaque announcing 'Stanley T. Shaw, Architect' is embedded in the sidewalk outside. Even the home address—which was changed from 2506 North Lawrence Street to 2500 North Lawrence Street—is a 'Stanley Thing.' "You may know, there are never any houses that are '00,'" explained Winters. "He decided in the late-1950s that he wanted '2500,' so he convinced the powers that be to change his house number." "A lot of delivery people call up and say, 'We're not going to CONTINUED deliver this because it's 2500,'" ON PAGE 2
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