Why The Hatteras Feels Like Home
A builder’s personal take on her favorite project — and the little girl who named a room after the Seahawks
The Hatteras is my favorite house we’ve ever built.
I say that knowing Mike and I have built a lot of homes together on Seattle’s Eastside, and I say it knowing I’ll probably say it again about another house someday. But right now, today, in this moment — it’s the Hatteras. And I want to tell you why, because I think the reasons say a lot about how Mirikeen Homes approaches every project we take on.
The Hatteras is a 5,800-square-foot home in Enatai. On paper, that’s a big house. But the first thing almost every buyer said when they walked through it during our open houses was some version of the same sentence: it feels like home. Not it’s impressive. Not it’s grand. It feels like home. I heard that so many times I started noticing it. And I started thinking about what, specifically, we’d done to earn that reaction — because a 5,800-square-foot house doesn’t accidentally feel cozy. That’s a design decision, made a hundred times over, in a hundred small places.
“A 5,800-square-foot house doesn’t accidentally feel cozy. That’s a design decision, made a hundred times over.”
Traditional Bones, Modern Touches
Mirikeen is known for traditional styling — shingle homes, Cape Cod lines, the kind of architecture that ages well and looks like it belongs on the Eastside. Mike and I both lean traditional personally, so our builds tend to start there. Lately, we’ve shifted a little more contemporary to reflect where the market is moving, but we’ve never wanted to lose the warmth that traditional homes do so well. The Hatteras is the clearest expression of that balance we’ve ever achieved.
The warmth comes from the millwork, first and foremost. Mike is known for his millwork details, and the running joke on our jobsites is that he doesn’t like drywall, so he has to cover it all up. That’s not actually true — he likes drywall just fine — but look around any Mirikeen home and you’ll see that millwork is everywhere. It’s in the built-ins, the wainscoting, the ceilings, the trim details you don’t consciously notice. Millwork is what gives a room depth. It’s what turns a nice room into a room you want to be in.
The modern side of the equation shows up in cleaner lines, elevated metal details, and transitions that feel contemporary without being cold. The wall color throughout most of the home is Sherwin Williams Soft Suede — one of their newer warm taupes — and I’m obsessed with it. It grounds every room without ever feeling heavy. That’s the whole Hatteras, really. Grounded, never heavy.
The Primary Wing — A Suite Designed Around a Tree
My favorite space in the home is what we ended up calling the primary wing. The original plan was a primary suite, but by the time Mike and I finished designing it with Dan Brobst — our architect at Brobst Designs, and honestly a magician — it had grown into the entire west side of the house. Calling it a suite didn’t do it justice anymore.
The defining feature of the whole wing is a single tree. There’s a large, old maple on the west side of the lot, and early in the design process I said out loud: I want the primary sitting room to feel like that tree is part of the room. Dan took it from there. We wrapped the sitting room in windows on a south-facing wall, and what happens in the afternoon is almost hard to describe. The light comes through the leaves and branches and fills the room, and during construction I started calling it the tree house. The name stuck.
The bedroom itself is oversized, but the materials are doing a lot of quiet work to keep it feeling warm — a marble fireplace, custom built-ins, carefully chosen sconces, and a center fixture that anchors the ceiling without demanding attention. The primary bath picks up the same marble tile I used in the fireplace. Dan gave us 14-foot ceilings with transom-style windows up high that let natural light pour in from above, and that detail changed everything — the room doesn’t feel like a bathroom, it feels like a retreat.
The closet flows directly into the laundry room, which is how I decided the laundry room was part of the primary wing. And once I decided that, I couldn’t treat it like a regular laundry room anymore. Same 14-foot ceilings. Crown molding. A shiplap ceiling. A seafoam green paint color that makes the whole space feel beachy. And a chandelier that looks like rising bubbles, because laundry rooms deserve chandeliers too.
“Laundry rooms deserve chandeliers too.”
That’s sort of the whole Mirikeen philosophy in a single room. Every space earns the same attention. Nothing is an afterthought. If you’re going to spend time somewhere, that somewhere should be worth spending time in.
The Hawks Nest — The Room That Sold the House
Now, I have to tell you about the media room, because it’s become one of my favorite stories about any home we’ve ever built.
The Hatteras has a third floor with two bonus rooms. We always imagined this house for a family, so we designed the third floor with two different uses in mind: a brighter kids’ play space, and a dedicated media room for movies and TV. We wanted the media room to feel moody and cinematic. So we painted it Peppercorn — a deep, rich Sherwin Williams gray-blue that I also happen to have in my own TV room. We love it there, and I knew it would work here.
At our very first open house, this lovely couple came through. We connected right away. They told me how much they loved the house, and I thought, what a nice pair of people. The next day, they came back. They brought their daughter, Chloe. They said, Lindsey, we had to bring Chloe because we wanted her to meet you. So the three of us chatted, and then they headed upstairs to walk Chloe through the rest of the house.
A few minutes later, her dad, Eric, came back down alone. I asked how it was going, and he said — I don’t think she’s coming down. I think she’s staying up there. And she’s named the room. She’s calling it the Hawks Nest.
It was February. We’d just won the Super Bowl. The walls were a deep, dark Seahawks-blue gray. I’d been calling the room the tree house — because apparently every room in this house was becoming a tree house — and this seven-year-old walked in and said, no, this is the Hawks Nest, and it’s mine.
They bought the house. We’ve spent a lot of time with the family since, and I adore them. That room is now, officially and forever, the Hawks Nest. And honestly, it might be my favorite room in the whole home — not because of how it looks, but because of how the house picked its people.
“I feel like we built this house for them, and they just hadn’t walked in yet.”
The Little Things That Make a Big House Livable
A few more details worth calling out, because they’re the reason the Hatteras actually works the way a family needs a home to work.
We have what we call our signature dog nook tucked under the stairs. It’s a Mirikeen staple — every one of our homes gets one — and this one has interior millwork details just like everywhere else in the house. Just because it’s for the dog doesn’t mean it can’t be special. That’s a direct quote I’ve said too many times to count on this project.
The kitchen is the main stage, but behind it is a full prep kitchen — a second kitchen with a range, oven, full-size refrigerator, dishwasher, and sink. The reason is simple: when you’re entertaining, the main kitchen stays photo-ready while the real cooking happens in the back. The feedback from buyers on this feature was so strong that we’re building a version of it into the Newport, the Mirikeen home we’re currently under construction on in Bellevue. And yes, the Hatteras also has a separate dedicated food pantry. The prep kitchen doesn’t replace the pantry. They work together.
The great room on the main floor is two stories tall, with its own wall of windows framing — you guessed it — the same maple tree the primary suite is built around. That tree is the visual anchor for two of the most important rooms in the entire home, and I think about that a lot. It’s a reminder that the best design decisions are often about what’s already there, and how you choose to honor it.
Why We Build the Way We Build
Mike and I started Mirikeen Homes as a boutique builder because we never wanted to be in the business of producing homes. We wanted to be in the business of building specific homes, for specific people, with the kind of care that only works if you keep your project count small. The Hatteras is what that philosophy looks like when everything comes together — when the architect (thank you, Dan), the millwork, the materials, the lighting, and the buyer all line up in the same direction.
When someone walks into a Mirikeen home and the first thing they say is it feels like home, that’s not luck. That’s a thousand small decisions made over a year and a half, by people who cared enough to make them.
And sometimes it’s a seven-year-old who walks in, looks around, and gives a room a name that sticks.
If you’d like to see The Hatteras, explore more of our work, or start a conversation about building your own custom home on Seattle’s Eastside, we’d love to hear from you. Visit the contact page or reach out directly.
— Lindsey Kull, Mirikeen Homes
