On a grassy knoll on the corner of West Beach and Hastie Lake Road sits a small brick Tudor-style house.

Standing out because of its steep roof, gables, tall slender chimney and brick work designs, this home commands attention and curiosity from passerbys. The true curiosity of this house, however, is the fact that this green knoll is not the first place this house has called home.

Sightseers may never have identified this house as having been uprooted from West Seattle and grafted into the hillside where it now sits, but this house is just one of many island homes that now resides somewhere other than its original abode.

Make way for

an interstate

This home on 2405 Hastie Lake Road for example found itself relocated, along with 13 other Seattle homes, to Whidbey Island’s West Beach when Washington state started making preparations for I-5 in the late 1940’s.

The job foreman, Oak Harbor’s Melvin Wilson, worked with another local resident, Lloyd Patton, who owned a great deal of land on the island, to buy these homes from the state, barge them across the Sound and haul them to their prospective plots of land.

Edith Wilson, wife of the late Melvin Wilson, said she remembers watching the men pull the houses off the barges and up the beach.

“The house right across on the corner didn’t lose a brick — not one,” she said.

With her husband moving the houses, Wilson said she could have had her pick of the homes, and said at first she wanted the corner home, but later chose one that was better suited for her husband, herself and their three children.

The current owner of this Tudor house, Laura Lynn, moved to Whidbey a year and a half ago from Oregon.

“When I moved here, the house did not make a good showing,” Lynn said.

She said she found the house neglected by its last owners and much of the home’s natural Tudor style hidden by wallpaper, paint and linoleum.

In the past year and a half, Lynn has ripped up carpeting to reveal the house’s hard-wood floors; stripped the doors and trim to reveal the house’s mahogany wood and warm red tones; and replaced the house’s small, lead-webbed window panes that were broken. She has also painted the home’s signature arches, polished the original fixtures and hardware and put to use all the home’s cedar-lined nooks and crannies.

“I think it is kind of fun,” Lynn said. “My dream was to have a house like this one so that I could do this.”

She said her hope is that the end result will take visitors back to the feel of the era that inspired the home’s architectural design.

Make way for

an airport

Another house that found itself relocated from Seattle to Whidbey is that of Bruce and Caroline Williams.

Lying on a sunny slope of land that used to be part of the 80-acre farm owned by Caroline’s father, Robert DeVries, this rambler moved in 1974, when the expansion of the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport took out several communities and housing developments.

Williams said the story goes that she and her husband wanted to build a house on some property her father had given them, but the cost of building would have used up a great deal of their retirement fund. Instead they decided to look for alternatives.

“My dad came along and said, ‘Why don’t you get one of those homes from Seattle that they’re selling from the airport?’” she said.

Taking her father’s advise, Williams said she and her husband bought their home for $15,500, and that price included all moving costs and damage repair.

After 30 years of living in the house, Williams said this is home.

“It was fun for me to think that we could live here after growing up here,” she said.

Make way

for electricity

Before interstates and airports gave people reasons to move houses, the lure of electric lights, heat and power made people pick up their house and move them.

The straight angled farmhouse that is now owned by Donald and Janice Thomas came a few miles through the woods to sit on the edge of DeVries Road.

Robert DeVries, who owned the farmhouse in the 1930’s, moved the house.

“When they brought electricity down to the island, houses had to be within a half mile from the main road,” Williams said, remembering back to when her father hauled her family’s home out of the woods.

DeVries moved the farmhouse with a stump pulling chain and a team of horses.

“Everyday, we’d come home and our house would be in a different place,” Williams said.

She laughed as she compared her unconventional mobile home to that of modern mobile homes or luxurious RV campers.

While their home was mobile, the DeVries still had to function as a farm and family. Williams said she remembers one day her mother had a pot of stew on the stove, but had to go outside and tend to something. When she came back, however, the house had moved, her stew had spilt and lunchtime was upon her. So, she picked up the stew as best she could and served it to the men just the same.

House moving may have its downside, but Williams said those who want to relocate a house should go for it.

“You see,” she said. “House moving is kind of in my background.”

So, for whatever reasons and whatever the type of home, house do move. They come from all over and find Whidbey Island quite suitable. On a knoll, farmland or a roadside, they often look as native as if they had grown there, settled into the landscape they call home.