A 115-year-old Seattle house that has become an anti-development symbol in the area could finally come to an end, after the house's current owner has determined that no one wanted to buy it because it was too expensive to renovate.
Fondly called the "Up House," Edith Macefield's century-old home at 1438 N.W. 46th Ballard, Seattle would either be relocated or demolished if no new buyers take on the offer.
Macefield, who died at 86 in 2008, became the talk of the town in 2006 when she famously turned down a $1 million from a development firm for her $120,000 home.
At the time, publicists for the Disney/Pixar animated film "Up" tied colorful balloons to the house to market the movie featuring the house of the surly Carl Fredricksen, who like Macefield refused to sell his house and tied it to thousands of balloons so he could fly. The 1,000 square meter Ballard house now stands surrounded by the gray concrete walls of a new building housing Trader Joe's and health clubs.
When Macefield died, she handed her house to Barry Martin, a construction superintendent who was in charge of the project that was supposed to tear her house down. Martin later sold the house for $300,000 to Reach Returns, which initially planned to preserve the house only to conclude that doing so was not a cost-effective measure.
The only choice, says Paul Thomas, a broker, was to donate the house to a non-profit organization and have them transfer it, or to destroy the house for good. The seller also plans to sell the land.
"After reviewing the situation, the seller has reluctantly concluded that their best option is to donate the house, ideally to a non-profit, and then sell the land," Thomas says in a statement to Ballard News Tribune. "It is really discouraging that developers can find ways to build multiple tall and skinny houses on a single residential lot but bringing new life to Edith Macefield's house isn't financially viable because there are so many hurdles."
A number of buyers have backed away from purchasing the house after calculating the high cost of rebuilding the house to meet the standards of the 2012 housing code.
One of these buyers is a woman who planned to turn the house into a coffee-and-pie shop with her teenage daughter. They were planning to call the shop Edith Pie, in honor of its owner. However, Thomas says the woman back down after she found that bringing the house up to the code would be financially "virtually impossible."
Speaking to The Seattle Times in 2006, Macefield said she did not want to be seen as a local hero for refusing to sell her house; she simply wanted to stay in it. Martin, after Macefield's death, said her will did not contain anything that required saving for posterity.
"As a matter of fact, she just wanted to keep the house long enough to finish her use of it," Martin says.
