Former Historical Horse And Carriage House For Sale

5155 NE Latimer Place

One of three original estates in the neighborhood, a horse and carriage house built in 1925 sitting on a 20,000 foot parcel with views of Lake Washington and Mount Rainier, is on the market for $3.25M.

A recent article gives some interesting history on the property located at 5155 NE Latimer Place:

This historic hillside manse, with its four stories all facing Lake Washington, is owned by Bob and Dee Simon, who purchased the home in 1998 for $1.2M. Bob is a seasoned fisheries entrepreneur and Dee is the executive director for the Seattle’s Holocaust Center for Humanity and they raised their daughter in the home where for the last twenty years. Dee says that each prior owner lived there no less than 20 years. 

She says the house was built by a banker named Leroy Backus in 1925 and then was bought by his vice president Norval Latimer, whom the street was named after and who lived at the estate for years.  

“It used to be a stable,” Dee says. “Latimer named the street after himself and sub-divided the property. You can still see where the carriages used to come down on the lower level. This house has a charm and history and a sense of place that I didn’t feel in many homes I looked at, when we were deciding where to live 20 years ago. And it is very roomy, very spacious because it wasn’t meant to be a house.”

Dee points out that the manse was built before the Montlake Cut was built. 

“Wood was a cheap commodity back in the early 1920’s,” she says. “But the builder chose to build this with steel-reinforced concrete, so it is built like a dam and it’s not going anywhere.”

The listing agent told the Laurelhurst Blog who researched the property in the History of Laurelhurst book written by Christine Barret, a former long-time resident of Laurelhurst: 

In 1900, a group of Seattle residents, inspired by the courses in Scotland where the game originated, decided to create a golf course, the original Seattle Golf Course along Lake Washington, in the area around Latimer Street.

There were only a few homes in the area at the time. The original club house,  located on the corner of NE 41^st Street and Latimer, is a private residence and was built by the same person who built the carriage house and who owned the entire parcel .     

Once considered waterfront property, the estate’s topography changed in 1916 when the water level around Lake Washington dropped by nearly nine feet with the building of the Ship Canal, then houses were eventually built along the newly exposed land.

Leroy Backus was one of the three original owners of large estates in the 1920’s when he purchased over two blocks of the area that was known as Laurelhurst Heights. He  lived in the large carriage house that overlooked Lake Washington.  

Legend has it that the carriage house was built as a result of a traumatic childhood memory that he had when Backus' beloved horses were lost to a fire in the stables. When building the foundation for, he used reinforced concrete and wooden boards lined vertically making the walls strong as a bunker and as fireproof as possible to avert any chances of losing his horses again.

The Latimer Family, who next lived in the home, re-platted the grounds to be sold in the 1930’s, saving the 20,000+ square foot lot and carriage house for themselves.  

In the 1970’s, the owner, Drs. John and Joan Hampson hired Keith Kolb, a well-known local architect and former UW architecture professor who built a home in 1960 on 37th Avenue NE, and changed the living pattern through the addition of the covered front entrance, the sun room and the Mediterranean-style outdoor deck continuing the curves of the new entry to the curves in the walls of the new stucco deck.  The next two owners also did remodeling. 

The lower level of the home still has remnants of the horse stable.   The carriages were stored on the main level and through the exterior windows facing the driveway is visible the rounded outline of the original doors  through the stucco.