On the dust jacket of the hardcover edition of Set This House, it says that you live “in Seattle, Washington, in what is arguably the most beautiful apartment house in the city.” What apartment house is that?
1005 East Roy Street, in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. It’s a big brick Tudor built in the late 1920s by Fredrick William Anhalt. My wife and I happened upon the building during a visit to Seattle in 1999, and instantly fell in love with it; when we moved to the city a year later, we decided to see if we could get an apartment there. Though none of the regular units were immediately available, the landlady Brenda Cavender took a liking to us, and let us move into Fred Anhalt’s old ground-floor studio for a few months while we waited for a two bedroom to open up. The second-floor apartment we ultimately settled in was one of the nicest in the building. There were windows on three sides, including a long southern exposure, and the bedroom that became my office had a holly tree right outside that featured a regular parade of squirrels, possums, finches, sparrows, woodpeckers, chickadees, hummingbirds, and the occasional tree-climbing cat. It was a really wonderful place to live and work.
