If you’ve ever looked for a new home in Beaux Arts Village, you already know the strange part. There almost never is one.
Lots change hands rarely in a town of 300 people. Families stay for decades, and when a property does sell, it’s usually to someone who wants the house that’s already on it. So at any given moment, the number of brand-new homes available in the Village is usually zero. Not a few. Zero.
That’s not a complaint. It’s the reason the Village looks the way it does, and it’s what makes a new home there a rare thing when one finally arrives.
“At any given moment, the number of brand-new homes available in the Village is usually zero.”
What the Village Is
If you’ve read our piece on Beaux Arts, you know the outline. Three hundred residents. Its own mayor, its own water system and water tower, and 1,100 feet of private Lake Washington shoreline that every property owner shares. Narrow, tree-lined streets where a golf cart is the sensible way to get to the beach. A park inside a city, minutes from downtown Bellevue.
People who live there tend to stay. That’s the whole reason a new home there is so rare.
The Hawthorne
We’ve designed one home for the Village, and we call it the Hawthorne.
Five bedrooms on a private, heavily wooded lot, roughly 4,500 square feet above grade, drawn by Dan Brobst of Brobst Design Works around how people actually live in this town. A main-level garage with a third bay sized for a golf cart. A walk-in pantry that doubles as a prep kitchen. Three-panel doors that open the whole main floor to the yard on a summer evening. Upstairs, the primary and two bedrooms with laundry on the same floor. Downstairs, a basement built for staying in: a game room with a wet bar, a media room, a workout room with a real window, and a guest bedroom with its own bath.
Outside, dark brown shingle, natural stone columns and heavy beams across the front. A Northwest lake house on a lot that reads like a forest.
We don’t expect to build another in Beaux Arts, so we’re making this one count. We’ll share it as it takes shape.
“A new home in the Village is a rare thing when one finally arrives.”
What This Means If You’re Thinking About 2027
The Hawthorne is a reminder of something true everywhere on the Eastside, not just in the Village: a new home takes longer to arrive than most people expect, and the biggest decisions get made early.
Most people call a custom builder when they’re ready to build. By then, a lot has already been decided for them. The honest shape of the timeline, for a home like ours, is this: find the lot, learn what it will actually let you do before you fall in love with a floor plan, design it properly, and plan on about a year of construction once it’s out of the ground. The steps in between run on the calendar of the town you build in, not yours, and we plan around that from the first meeting.
If you want to be in a new home in 2027, work backward from that and you land in a conversation that should be happening now. Even if you don’t have a lot yet. Especially if you don’t have a lot yet, because we’d much rather walk a piece of land with you before you buy it than after.
Let’s Talk Before You’re Ready
We build a small number of homes each year, and we take on custom clients carefully, because a custom home is a long relationship. If 2027 is on your mind, even loosely, reach out. That first conversation will tell you more about your real timeline than anything you can read online, including this.
Lindsey Jacobsen, Mirikeen Homes
