Riggs’s childhood home faced Mutiny Bay on Washington State’s Whidbey Island. 
Family and friends in a truck near Riggs’s house. 
Riggs preparing pancakes at the kitchen table. 
Riggs and her friends showing off their bellies.
Kellie Riggs is a curator, writer, and fine jeweler.
“I grew up on Whidbey Island, in Washington State. It was a small, midcentury house that I think was built in the forties. The geography and nature in Washington is so beautiful that, as a kid, you have no idea that the rest of the world doesn’t look like that. I totally took it for granted. We were always in the water, always went out clamming when the tide was flat.
My parents were very clever about how they subdivided the rooms. It was really, really small, but it felt like there were nooks and crannies everywhere. And so you had your choice of zone. When you walked in, it opened up to the living room on the left, and then that opened up to the dining room. The living room was all wood paneling, and the dining room wasn’t. So there were indications that you were somewhere else, even if there wasn’t a proper threshold to go through. Everything was very distinct in that way.
In our bedrooms, my mom really cared about us feeling like autonomous little people. And so my sister and I painted our room six different colors; my other sister’s room was all red. It was like choosing a flavor, I suppose. Things like that made the house feel really diverse, and not cooped-up at all. It was just a really sort of simple place where we did everything ourselves.
The view from the home’s front door entrance. 
The house’s beloved kitchen table, designed by Riggs’s father. 
Riggs in the snow outside her childhood home.
The reason that the house worked for us was this idea of permeable space. That’s one of the major ingredients for a successful space of any kind. It has to be easy to get in and get out of. We had this illusion of choice, like, ‘Oh, I can be here. Then I can be here. Then I can be here.’ There was an ease to the design.
There was a sense of ‘create the space you want’—and that becomes the space you need. In one’s home, if you’re lucky enough to be able to build it, what you want, and what you need, can be the same thing, if you’re clever.
Architecture can be really overwhelming, angular, or on top of itself. This house was the opposite of that—it was about fluidity and ease.
My dad is an amateur carpenter. He designed the kitchen, and he and his friend built it together. (They also extended the house from having one bedroom to three.) The kitchen island my dad designed was curved, which is a much more welcoming shape than a square. I mean, these things are sort of silly, but it really was about, ‘How do we inhabit and share the space in the easiest way possible?’
There was a sense of—I don’t even think this is a word—‘fusslessness,’ which I really enjoy in essentially everything I do today. Fussy could mean complicated, or cumbersome. But then unfussy could mean boring or straightforward. I don’t mean any of those things: I mean that the house was very efficient. There was a quickness to it, where you get integrity and usefulness and beauty in the most compact of gestures.
I had an English teacher in high school who never gave us a page count when he assigned papers. ‘It’s done when it’s done,’ he’d say. If I have to think of a philosophical way to describe what I’m trying to say, it’s that: Things are done when they’re done. And they’re not overwrought and they’re not finished too soon.
It’s very [Carlo] Scarpa. He was so good at asking, ‘What does the thing need?’ Even the way he thought about hinges or stairwells or fixtures—he just always answered the call of what the thing needed.”
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. (Photos: Courtesy Kellie Riggs)