Note: All photos shared by Lisa Harris and Matthew Swett. This story appeared previously in a special Home & Garden issue published by The South Whidbey Record/Whidbey News Times April 2025.
Lisa Harris, CEO of Harris Environmental Group in Tucson and Seattle, traces her Whidbey Island connection to the 1980s when her parents retired and bought a home overlooking Mutiny Bay. It was spending time on Whidbey each summer with her family that led Harris to building her own home at Bush Point nearly 30 years later.
“My parents lived right over the marshy area, and had amazing views of the shipping lanes,” Harris said. “They bought the property with an unfinished home in ’86. We started coming out shortly after. Father was an engineer and built things. My mother was an artist. They remodeled and did major renovations. I had recently moved to Arizona to earn a PhD in Ecology. Coming to Whidbey from the desert was a pleasure. My husband was a salmon fisher and fished at Bush Point. We came up for a couple of weeks each summer.”
Harris was married at the time to Peter Treistman, an investigative reporter, who died in 1993
After Harris’ parents passed away, their home was sold in 2016. Harris wondered at the time where she would continue spending summers away from Tucson’s hottest season now that her Whidbey ‘home’ was gone.
Harris spent the following two years searching for the magic she recalled feeling at her parents’ place. However, she wanted less land than the 3-acre property and gardens her parents had once managed. Given she had two daughters, six cats, two dogs, and a full-time job, Harris wanted a smaller parcel to live on.
She finally found a property with the qualities she wanted, but it had problems.
“I found the house in Bush Point, occupying a little more than half an acre overlooking Mutiny Bay, near where Peter would fish, and I felt like I was coming home,” Harris said. “It was vacant and part of an estate. The daughters of the woman who lived in it had turned the heat off when she died the previous October. When I viewed the house in March, all I could smell was mold.”
For years, Harris drove by Taproot Architects on Bayview Road, on her way to and from Langley. She admired the living roof of plants topping a building on the property and knew that if she ever built a house, she would use this architect, although she had no knowledge of the style of homes Taproot built or who they were.
“I was enamored by his living roof on his office,” Harris recalled. “Every time I drove by, I said ‘That’s the person I want as my architect.’ I called him and hired him sight unseen.”
Matthew Swett who owns Taproot Architects with his wife Sarah Birger, designs homes focused on regenerative and ecological principals. Given his mission for salvaging and reusing existing building material, Swett assumed at first the home at Bush Point could be saved.
“I said I don’t want to remodel, and Matthew assured me he could work wonders remodeling the existing home,” Harris explained. I said, ‘OK, I’ll humor this man.’ We opened the door and a blast of mold spores greeted us. He said, ‘You’re right. It goes down.’”
“Generally I try to conserve the embodied energy in an existing structure, but the existing house had a long retaining wall along the back of the building which did not adequately drain,” Swett wrote in a text. “Moisture intrusion led to mold and mildew which compromised the health of the structure and is very difficult to remediate/fix.”
While most of the home was demolished, some bits were saved for re-use. Salvaged from the property was its original foundation, repurposed into urbanite, a term used to describe recycled concrete rubble.
Swett said, “We repurposed the existing concrete to build the landscape retaining walls which allowed us to use the embodied energy of the concrete in a useful way.”
Harris believes in recycling and reusing whenever possible.“A lot of the material used in the house was made of recycled material,” she said. “The tile I chose was made from recycled glass. A turquoise blue colored tile was made from old semi truck windows. Another cobalt blue tile was made from vodka bottles that were melted down. There is an amazing mosaic shower wall in the bathroom that my older daughter Lyda designed, again using glass tiles that were created from recycled glass. The pattern is very colorful and complex. The tile people had a lot of trouble with our choices.‘Why would you want this garish thing?’ they asked. I’m into color as there are muted colors in the desert, and people [who live there]paint their houses wild colors. A lot of the Pacific Northwest tile is gray. I don’t want to be surrounded by gray.”
Her new home overlooks Bush Point and Mutiny Bay. Its genius loci—Latin for spirit of the place—evoked her husband Peter’s joy of fishing.
“My husband died of cancer, and I felt I was bringing his memory there,” Harris said. “An interesting feature of the home is that it is now set further back on the lot than the original house, so the view now is broader.”
The view from Harris’ home includes vistas of Admiralty Inlet’s shipping lanes framed by the Olympic Mountain range. The home is designed to attract the sun for warmth on cooler days, and keep it cool in the summer. It also provides electricity gleaned from the sun’s energy.
“The house is equipped with solar panels and is west-facing, so there are a lot of windows to capture the sun,” Harris said. “Since I’m used to the heat, I can open the house and have cross breezes coming through.”
The home’s yard required considerable upgrading. Sarah Birger designed the garden layout, and horticulturalist Cathy Wymire-Rooks of Inspired Gardens was the garden designer, installing plants to deter deer and rodents, which include ceanothus, and dahlias. The home’s lower front yard—a septic drainage field—once was covered in lawn. Harris converted it into a meadow which serves as habitat for native pollinators.
“I’ve spent six years now, weeding out blackberry, thistle and now, the meadow has primarily native plants,” Harris said. “The neighbors were a little skeptical of that, because people are used to mowing their grass. I’ve had to educate them, assuring that no, the meadow won’t degrade their property value. No, it won’t spread weeds. It’s an endeavor to continually maintain.”
An advocate of native habitats, Harris planted gardens to attract birds and pollinators.
“I’m a wildlife biologist who specializes in plant restoration, so I planted penstemon, salvia, current—which produces nectar for birds, butterflies and moths. I have Goldfinch, hummingbirds visiting,” Harris noted. “My lower level roof is succulents which bloom. All of these plants were installed to support the native birds and insects. In turn, they pollinate an orchard in the home’s backyard, so everyone—birds, insects, and me–eats from the garden.”
Following Harris’ desire to hire Taproot in the first place, a living roof was installed in 2019 as part of the overall architectural design. Harris described its landscape for a 2023 Whidbey Island Garden Tour in which her home and gardens were included:
“Flats of sedums (succulents) create a uniform planting area. Designed and constructed by Green Feathers (Oregon) and includes sedums hardy to our region. Requires periodic weeding and bimonthly watering (June – September). Over-seeded with wildflowers (poppies), which have blown down to the water-side of the house and spread. Creates more surface area for pollinators, oxygen production, and adds insulation to house. Note sedum coloration changes from sun and water exposure.”
Swett built the home’s decks with Kebony, a wood product infused with a bio-based liquid forming polymers which create a moisture barrier, added strength and durability to the material.
“The product is worth promoting far and wide,” he said. “The deck lasts at least twice as long. Insects won’t bite it. What’s neat is no heavy metals or arsenic are used in its production.”
Harris and Taproot created a home and garden that’s integrated with the environment. The small property is manageable and the house is cost efficient to operate. “While I was sorry to sell my parent’s house above the marsh, I feel at home here in Bush Point,” Harris said.