Love story plus house

She crafts with words and he crafts with wood - both of them masters of their form. As a couple Carol and George Levin have also rewritten a love story together, and it manifests in their jewel house on Sunset Hill. Man, woman, house, dogs, there is no longer one without the other in their combined story.

In their entirety the biographies of Carol and George (Geo) would have many chapters, their childhoods on different sides of the country, first marriages, first careers, hers in dance and employment relations, his in the Air Force and engineering. Then there are separate and combined interests, theater, flying, radio, sailboat racing, translation, yoga, poetry, and their beloved dogs.

Just south of Sunset Hill Park on 34th Northwest their house is the one with the dog watering bowl in front, the mannequin in the window and 82 years of storied history on the inside. The original owners were the Joneses, known for three locations of Jones Brothers Meats including the one next to the Sunset Hotel on 22nd Northwest. One Saturday the Levins introduced themselves in the butcher shop. The Jones brothers began to sing a Swedish song that their father would sing when the moon was full and setting to the west. With five children in a house perched on a steep drop, Mother Jones was too nervous and they moved in 1927.

The real estate title is framed in George and Carol's bedroom; $43,000 in 1974. But the title has additional meaning; after living apart for a year after their marriage, this was their first home together. They vowed it would also be their last. A pilot, sailor and former live-aboard, George said he couldn't live in Carol's house; it made him claustrophobic. "It was a very nice house," Carol recalls, but after living apart they realized that if the marriage were to survive they needed to cohabitate. An agent took them straight to the house on Sunset Hill: they never looked at any other houses. Yet their first year was "very difficult" according to Carol. "It was awful," added Geo.

Two strong independent people were attempting to merge lives, with combined assets that included a barber chair, handmade furniture, two teenage children and woodworking materials. Together they acquired a home that was already known for its view and location. A Russian director who lived with them off and on while staging Chekhov's works pronounced that American culture "is about the house." This house on 34th Northwest is more of a museum. It is the showroom for George's internationally known work in fine furniture building and a hand-renovated masterpiece in which not a single bit of space is wasted. Carol's forthcoming poetry chapbook "Red Rooms and Others" is inspired by the house.

The tour takes over an hour, but it also a travelogue about their separate journeys. Carol was a lonely child who didn't talk, "I read." Her study is walled in books and slide photos; George's downstairs workshop declares his passion for flight, with aircraft photos covering the walls and the ceiling. From the basement studio to the guest quarters on the second floor the house is a riot of a bay windows. One can sit or sleep in almost all of them, like boat benches they fold up or down, slide in or out. Their bed is in a bay, suspending them out above the steepest part of Sunset Hill. "Our nest," Carol says, but it is not just a nest, it is an aerie.

Every surface has been considered, mirrors on the kitchen ceiling and above the deep bathtub bring the outside in. George lets Carol show me the house while he sits reading in the antique barber chair that she brought to the marriage. But Carol (and the dogs) follow as George shows me a workshop that is big enough to accommodate sheets of wood, but no bigger than it needs to be for efficiency. He has just finished two commissions and is about to begin two more.

From sculptures of each other to framed poems, from a handmade grandfather's clock to their "calendar of life" with its own signed cabinet, the home is a love song. It holds the music of the past in its walls, arias sung by the butchers and painstaking translations of Chekhov, while showcasing timeless works in words and wood. Meanwhile evening light reaches every corner as the sun moves over the Olympics, each skylight and bay window drawing rays like birdbaths draw chickadees.

After the tour we sit in the living room and I hear their story in two voices, how Carol met Geo and Geo met Carol. The dogs listen as though they never tire of the story. But the love story doesn't even need words. It's in the cabinets that George built into the kitchen and the way he listens to Carol from his perch in the barber's chair. It's in the way that she sits up on his workbench while he points out various tools and the way they beam at each other. Sometimes Carol discovers Geo in front of her computer watching the screensaver that is wired into a photo program, "The pictures of our life together."

Peggy Sturdivant writes a series on neighborhoods for CrossCut.com and also writes additional pieces for the Seattle PI's Neighborhood Webtown: http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/ballard/ Her email is atlargeinballard@yahoo.com