Seattle - it's what's for dinner

My good luck with Seattle weather continues - a picture perfect day and a great time visiting with Scott. Got the car washed; it still had a lot of dust and road love from New Mexico and I figured it was time to clean it off. Started out from Olympia with a Starbucks firmly in hand and made my way up to Seattle proper.

I have a Magellan GPS with me, which I inherited from a beta test I did last year. It's a quirky device, but generally helpful. Quirky because when I plugged in the trip from Sacramento to Seattle, it told me the shortest route was via Salt Lake City and Spokane, which I ignored, saving me 9 hours of driving. Today it navigated me right to my destination in direct fashion. I can't complain since I didn't pay for the thing.

I couldn't get ahold of Scott at first, so I headed to the Henrybuilt showroom, which is in a great location near the Marketplace, a block from the waterfront. The showroom space is beautiful - an old warehouse like the ones in SoHo. Donald Judd would have loved this space. Massive wooden structural members and a spare floor plan with the displays peppered around. The cabinetry is top-notch: the designs are restrained without being prissy, and every detail is well-resolved and carefully crafted. The more time I spent with it, the more I found that I liked.

After chatting a bit with the folks at the showroom, I decided to head over to the factory to see if Scott was there. The factory's just a short drive south along the waterfront, where there are huge shipping gantries loading containers. Scott met me there and gave me a quick tour, and then we headed over to a bistro for a sandwich. People in Seattle must really love the simple, daily things in life, because they do such a good job with them. Fresh bread, simple ingredients. Good eats.

Scott and I caught up on the broad strokes - family, friends etc - since we haven't seen each other for over 20 years. After lunch we went to the showroom, where he showed me some new products and a nifty magnetized design tool. We talked a bit about the business. Scott has a good mastery of marketing and a strong sense of the role authenticity plays in backing it up in the product. It's an inversion of the usual build it and they will come syndrome. He thought about what was not in the market, and what he wanted to see, and then made it happen. Sort of like SketchUp, come to think of it.

Scott needed to get some work done, so we went back to the factory and he introduced me to Dylan, who gave me an excellent in-depth tour of the engineering and production processes. Dylan has been with the company for four years. He's a bright young man who trained as an industrial designer. He described the progression of their systems, starting with early "tribal knowledge" and how that developed into a formal set of standards and designs. Simplicity is in evidence throughout, which I know is the product of a lot of hard work. Complex is easy, simple ain't.

At the end of the day, Scott and I headed over to a nearby bar stocked with a few tattooed patrons - mostly Longshoremen, union dudes and their mates. Then we headed home - Scott to Vashon Island, and recommended I stay at the Ace Hotel. I grabbed a room there for cheap - $99 in the middle of Seattle is a deal. I thought sushi might be a good bet here, so I walked over to Wasabi, a couple blocks away. Had a "small" sashimi platter that would have been enough for two. Excellent fish. No matter how good the sushi is in Colorado, you can't move the ocean any closer. This was the reel deal.

Called up Patti and Andre, who we knew back in the SCI-Arc days, and stayed with up here just after they moved in 91. They have three kids, two already in college and one more on deck. We agreed to have dinner together at their place tomorrow night. Should be a good time ;-) Then Isabel and I will head up to Vancouver on Saturday morning. Expecting a traffic jam at the ferry, but who cares? The view should be worth dallying around.