This Tiny Seattle Houseboat Is Just What the Doctor Ordered

Welcome to Beach Week, our annual celebration of the best place on Earth.  

David Roach had been living in Seattle for seven years before he first set foot on a houseboat. "I was just blown away," he says. Beyond the boat itself, David was struck by the close-knit community where the boat was docked, as well as the waterfront environment at large.

David grew up in Pasco, in the drier part of the state, and attended the University of Washington in Seattle before moving to Boston for his residency as an infectious disease physician and researcher. While attending medical school, he started scuba diving in tropical locations, and he later worked with a group of nurses who introduced him to cold-water scuba diving in the region. 

David says he found the houseboat way of life "so peaceful and beautiful." Much like diving, living on the water "was such an amazing way to be a part of the geography of the city." 

Although the city is famous for houseboats—thanks, Sleepless in Seattle—there’s actually a very limited number of docking locations available. (Also, the term "houseboat" is not technically precise, so the city has defined four different classes: floating homes, house barges, floating on-water residences, and vessels with dwelling units.)

Floating communities popped up in Seattle as early as the 1880s, first as low-cost housing for logging industry workers, and later as summer getaways for the rich. By 1902, there were 1,000 of these so-called "Amphibian Houses." Today, the city caps the number at 525 floating homes and 250 "houseboats" across the various marinas and moorages in Lake Union and Portage Bay. 

Since his first visit to a floating home in 2016, David kept an eye on the market, and he pounced on a listing in 2019 that came with its own slip (which meant he could own the space instead of leasing). It’s in a desirable location near Gas Works Park, a former oil plant turned 20-acre green space with stunning views of the city skyline. "The boat itself was essentially a floating shack not worth anything," says David—so he opted to build a new home from scratch.

He reached out to a longtime friend, architect Aimée O’Carroll, who co-founded GO'C Studio with architect Jon Gentry, for a remodel. The pair designed a floating sauna a few years before, which David had toured. "It was important to me to do this with people I knew and trusted, and to maintain a community feel during the build itself," says David, who hired friends for almost every aspect of the project—from the construction team at Wild Tree Woodworks, to the electrician and metalsmith. "It ended up being so amazing to have people I trusted building this, because it was a really complicated process in a lot of ways."