A carved bird by Seattle artist Michael Zitka perches on an inside ledge.
Featured Homes
Shedding Light
Constructed with a hodgepodge of 43 glass windows and doors, Jennie Hammill's sparkling garden house in Ballard is the perfect place to take tea and observe the plants and resident birdlife.

Design Details
Architect: Randolph Scott Keller, ASLA Landscape Architect, (206) 782-1521

Builder and Garden Designer: Jennie Hammill, Ballard Woodworks, (206) 783-5952
Stylish Sheds and Elegant Hideaways: Big Ideas for Small Backyard Destinations (Clarkson Potter/Random House, 2008), written by Debra Prinzing and photographed by William P. Wright. $30, 224 pages; ISBN: 978-0-307-35291-0
Must-haves:    
Walls made from salvaged windows in a variety of styles and sizes; a bench that converts into a daybed; places for reading, serving tea and enjoying meals; niches for displaying collections; a conservatory roof; interior lighting; a weatherproof floor.

Inspiration:    
A whimsical garden house—made from recycled windows, stained glass and shutters—designed by Jennie's neighbor Randy Keller, a landscape architect. She enlisted him to help her create something similar for her own backyard.

Design challenges:    
To design and build a 124-square-foot building entirely out of glass; to situate it in such a way that it didn't overpower a 40-foot-by-108-foot city lot but maximized garden views.

Creative solutions:    
Jennie placed her “teahouse” near the south property line of her backyard, at the foot of three large Douglas fir trees. The structure is aligned to capture two major sightlines: looking west along the side garden and east toward the patio garden.
Jennie Hammill salvaged and recycled many of the frames and built 20-inch-square windows with crossed mullions to wrap around the clerestory below the roof of her 10-foot-by-14-foot glass “teahouse.”
Sipping and reading are two of Jennie Hammill's frequent pastimes here. She designed and built the hinged bench, which folds open into a full-sized platform bed for another pleasant activity: afternoon naps.
A pair of red French door frames the teahouse entrance, drawing guests inside.
A songbird motif appears on top of a round accent table placed in front of the window.

Mission: To create a miniature glass conservatory for privacy and seclusion in a city garden. Jennie Hammill supports herself by combining two professions that others may find incongruous: She teaches piano students ages 6 to 76 at side-by-side grand pianos in her living room, and she runs Ballard Woodworks, a custom cabinetry business in her 1,100-square-foot basement shop. Music and woodworking require equal parts discipline and free expression, explains the petite blonde. “It's the combination of aural and visual,” she concedes. “I need a balance of both.”

Called “Miss Jennie” by piano students young and old, she picked up saws, planes and chisels long after she gained her familiarity with a piano keyboard. While earning her doctorate in piano performance at the University of Washington, Jennie visited a woodworking class at a Seattle community college. “It was the coolest thing,” she recalls. “I felt like a kid in a candy shop. I remember thinking, ‘This is what I want.' ”

Smelling fresh-cut wood and feeling sawdust beneath her shoes triggered for Jennie favorite memories of helping her father in his wood shop. She was in her late 30s when this life-changing new chapter opened up. “During my first quarter of woodworking school, I also defended my dissertation,” Jennie recalls.

There is plenty of evidence of Jennie's gift for fine cabinetmaking in the two-story 1926 Seattle cottage she shares with her husband, Tully Hammill, a retired computer programmer. The kitchen cupboards, bathroom vanity, bookcases and tables are among the many home improvement projects she's undertaken.

Outside, in their small city garden, stands an extraordinary example of Jennie's carpentry. Working around her piano-teaching schedule, this gifted musician-turned-woodworker constructed a miniature glass conservatory. Both delicate and substantial, her “teahouse” is where she enjoys quiet moments sharing cups of English breakfast or Earl Grey tea with friends, reading and finding respite without leaving home.

An avid gardener who is active in the Northwest Perennial Alliance, Jennie found it difficult to keep plants alive beneath the three Douglas firs that tower above the south side of her garden. “My motto is, if you can't get anything to grow in a spot, build something there,” she says with a knowing grin. And soon she found the solution to a fallow patch of earth: a tiny garden conservatory built by her neighbor Randolph Scott Keller, a landscape architect. Measuring about 7 feet by 8 feet, with a small vestibule at either end, Keller's miniature garden house not only appealed to Jennie but also got her thinking about how to construct one of her own.

Keller created his backyard structure using a large stained-glass window from an ancient church in Spain and other salvaged windows. He and his wife, Victoria, enjoy views of their summer garden from here and add holiday decorations to the little building come December. “It's like a jewel to reflect light back into the garden,” he says.

Jennie's teahouse enhances what was once an uninspiring section of her garden. From its location beneath the fir trees, she enjoys “the longest views our property has to offer.” With Keller as her designer and “coach,” Jennie spent most of the summer of 2004 building the glass house; she finished it the following spring.

She excavated soil to place the finished structure “low and settled in the garden, amid the plants.” This feeling is reinforced by deep borders of ornamental trees, shrubs and perennials that grow along the east and west sides. Jennie has trained climbing vines to scramble up to the roof's edge and twist around a horizontal strip of wood added for that purpose.

The woodworker amassed vintage windows to form walls of the main 10-foot-by-10-foot structure and a 6-foot-by-4-foot bump-out on one side. She also found windows with leaded glass, divided panes and even a cottage-style one made from 30 tiny squares of glass; most of them cost only $5 to $20. She cut old glass panes to fit necessary sizes and custom-built a dozen 20-inch-square windows, each with two crossed mullions. These charming pieces surround the sides of a second-tier clerestory, so that even more light floods the interior space. The design echoes windows seen on Seattle's famed Volunteer Park Conservatory, a Victorian-era glass house erected in 1912.

Jennie attached the window-walls to 12-foot-tall corner posts set in concrete footings. “I used clamps and little boards to hold things in place while I bolted them together,” she explains. She finished the lower portion of interior walls with wainscoting and covered the floor with reddish pavers set in sand. The blue-gray exterior paint complements a golden full-moon Japanese maple planted in the garden.

Jennie and Tully love to dine here together or with friends. They pull a round table to the center of the teahouse so two people can sit on a built-in bench made by Jennie and four others can use chairs. A buffet is laid out on the potting bench inside an adjacent tool shed, a fanciful structure that Jennie also created. “We come here in the late afternoon or evening. The sun arrives from the west, and it feels toasty warm inside because the stone floor holds the heat.”

While she first worried that the teahouse would crowd her garden, Jennie says it has done the opposite. “I thought it would make the garden look totally minuscule, but the garden feels more spacious now,” she says. 

Debra Prinzing and William Wright woke up at 4:30 a.m. on a misty morning in June 2007 to photograph Jennie and Tully Hammill's garden house for their new book, Stylish Sheds and Elegant Hideaways: Big Ideas for Small Backyard Destinations (Clarkson Potter/ Random House, 2008). It is one of more than 30 such locations they visited—and documented—across the country.

Brunch is set at a drop-leaf table that Jennie refinished to match the room's butter-colored interior. Jennie appropriated more vintage windows and another set of French doors to design and build a playful 3-foot-by-5-foot shed to store tools and flowerpots—it reminds Jennie of a London telephone booth.
The red-tipped Japanese maple foliage inspired her choice of raspberry-red paint for the doors. Jennie artfully designed and laid the pebble mosaic threshold to bridge garden and patio areas.