For Seattle-based artist/designer Roy McMakin, simple things can be very complicated. And vice versa. Take, for example, the house his firm, Domestic Architecture, designed for a longtime friend: a music manager who spends one third of his time in Los Angeles, one third traveling, and one third escaping to his McMakin-designed retreat on Vashon Island, just a 20-minute ferry ride from Seattle. Seen from a distance, the house appears as a quaint farmhouse—a metal gable roof, board and batten siding, double hung windows—set on 13 acres of forest and pastures with views of Puget Sound. But come closer, and you understand why the homeowner says he lives “inside a sculpture” and why, for him, it is a place where personal history and love of art collide. As a dedicated collector of McMakin’s work (furniture and objects that turn nostalgia and domesticity on its head), he turned to his friend to help shape his memories—of the wild meadows of Northern California’s Marin County, where he grew up, as well as his grandmother’s farm in Iowa, where, as a child, he spent his summers—into what he calls “functional art.”