It’s probably rare for a Grammy Award nominee to fix their own toilet. But for James Mercer, the singer-songwriter behind indie rock band The Shins, the powder room’s original high-tank toilet in question was—if not worthy of a ballad—certainly worth saving, because it was perfectly in keeping with the rambling Portland, Oregon, Victorian he shares with his wife, garden designer Marisa Kula Mercer, and their three children. Previous owners had stripped its wooden surface, afflicting it with a Reagan-era golden oak hue and unsightly screws, and “James beautifully refinished it,” says the couple’s friend and designer, Jessica Helgerson. “It glows.”
Glowing, too: the entire 1890 home, having recently emerged from an incremental remodel that spanned 12 years, during which the Mercers brought in Helgerson and her firm to help them reimagine their home while remaining tonally true to the Queen Anne style. “We didn’t do the whole thing where you buy a place and then just basically gut it,” James notes, adding that the house’s original elements were what charmed them into buying it in the first place: “I love even the nicks and scratches.” The existing homestead presides over nearly an acre, a former hazelnut orchard with 300-year-old Douglas fir trees. It’s an idyllic plot for Marisa’s layered, Anglophilic gardens (she has studied at Great Dixter House & Gardens in East Sussex, England; mountain fleece, spotted joe-pye weed, and Culver’s root are exultant on the grounds).
But five years into living there, the family realized they needed much more from the house itself. “We wanted to gain some of the benefits of modern design, the sort of ease of access to the outdoors,” recalls James, whose band has a new, as-yet-untitled album coming out this year. “There was nothing like that with the original layout.” Helgerson is, he admits, “a total genius” at making remodels seem historic. Early on, after the couple struggled to redesign the existing kitchen by themselves, they asked her to come over and assess the situation. “In 10 minutes—it was like that scene from A Beautiful Mind—she’s just looking at everything and then she immediately says, ‘You’ve got to move the doorway and move the hutch from the dining room,’ ” Marisa says. “James and I just looked at each other and we were like, ‘We’ve got to work with Jessica. We’re hiring Jessica. [We told her] ‘You figured out all the problems in a matter of minutes!’ ”
