SHED Architecture & Design's Ghost Cabin isn't exactly a haunted house like its name suggests. The new courtyard art installation pays tribute to a site dubbed “Grandma's House” in the Chophouse Row development in Seattle's Capitol Hill. While building the Chophouse Row in 2013, contractors unearthed the mysterious site, which revealed the foundation of a small house that was once part of a late 19th-century pioneer settlement. The contractors then nicknamed the structure “Grandma's House” because whenever the Chophouse Row ran into construction delays, they would joke that “Grandma's ghost” had returned to slow down their progress. 

In 2017, Chophouse Row owner and developer Liz Dunn commissioned an art installation for the courtyard above Grandma's House that had to create a sense of community as well as respect the site's history. 

In response to that, SHED proposed the Ghost Cabin, whose name was inspired by the Grandma's House story. While designing the artwork, SHED projected the silhouette of a gable cabin onto various surfaces of the courtyard corner and then applied cedar wood planks within the artwork's boundaries. “When visitors move through the space, the angled outline of the structure becomes increasingly distorted and unrecognizable. But from a precise vantage point, the cedar planks come into alignment to reveal the gabled cabin,” SHED explains.

“Like a ghost, its aura is ever-present but ephemeral,” SHED Principal Prentis Hale said. “Its form is there and then not there, visible only to the curious.”

The use of cedar planks is a historic reference to the ancient forests that once occupied Capitol Hill and the 19th-century cedar longhouses of the Duwamish People. 

Now complete, the Ghost Cabin serves as a public gathering and event space, allowing Chophouse Row visitors to experience the site's original structure in a new way.

Check out more project photos in the gallery below.

Project Team
Artist: SHED Architecture & Design
Contractor: Plumb Level Square
Client: Liz Dunn, Dunn & Hobbes
Curator: Greg Lundgren, Vital 5 Productions
Photography: Rafael Soldi