Unique 19th-Century timber cabin on a large wooded lot with its own private 100’ beach on Case Inlet, the southern tip of Puget Sound. 1 bedroom/1 bath, sleeps 4 with hide-a-bed. On the water midway between Shelton and Bremerton, in a pastoral semi-wild setting that's 8 miles from town but still home to heron, bald eagles, beavers, seals, deer, rabbits, and a very bio-diverse tide-flat zone. Half-mile from a full-service marina; kayak rentals 3 miles away. Unlike anything else on the market. The space THE CABIN The Stanley House was one the last homes built in the rough-hewn archaic style favored by the first white settlers occupying the farthest reaches of Puget Sound in the 1890’s. In 1928 a group of West Seattle neighbors floated barges of finished lumber across the Sound to beachfront property they bought on Case Inlet, just north of Grapeview Washington, where they built a row of waterfront cabins under the supervision of Roy C. Stanley, an owner who also happened to be a professional architect. Looking backward for inspiration, Stanley recreated several versions of the steeply-roofed raw-wood houses that had been common along upper Puget Sound in the late 1800’s. For decades, daily life at the cabin relied on kerosene lanterns after dark, a wood-fired cook-stove, hand-pumped well water, and a two-seater outhouse up the trail. In 1968 Roy’s son Robert Stanley added plumbing, electricity, baseboard heaters and a new bedroom, which brought basic 20th-century comforts to this surviving jewel of early Northwest history, and turned it into a cozy year-round family home. By the 1990’s, the South Sound area had witnessed succeeding generations of residential buildings all torn down to make way for the newer models that occupy the shoreline today. Now only the Stanley House remains, as one of Puget Sound’s very oldest and most unusual dwellings. THE WOODS It doesn’t take long for man’s works to melt away in the weather and rain of the Olympic Peninsula. The Stanley House is indeed showing telltale signs of age, but it’s still sturdy and warm as it approaches its second century of life in the forest. The cabin feels almost like an outgrowth of that forest - linked by its materials and construction style to the woods and water and wilderness, the house is very much a part of its surrounding natural environment, one more organic element drawing visitors into the life of a 100’ x 300’ sanctuary dense with huckleberry bushes, Madrona trees, and towering Douglas firs crowding up against rafter & beam. THE WILDLIFE The Stanley House is not a motel and this is not a sterile landscape. We maintain a pesticide-free household, and guests may encounter a few mosquitos and even one or two living, breathing spiders. The lot is home to frogs, garter snakes and small lizards who remain well hidden, which is more than the raccoons can say for themselves . . . We do welcome pets and most pets love the place, but we also ask to be indemnified against any inter-species incidents that may arise. Robert Stanley lived in the cabin year-round with a cat named Sam, and it’s worth emphasizing that Sam co-existed peacefully with a pack of raccoons who were living year-round beneath the cabin. For 11 years Sam and the raccoons gathered on the porch every evening to eat pet food together, without a single argument, or even much mutual interest. The raccoons have abandoned the crawl space but they’re still in the neighborhood, along with rabbits, possums, native red squirrels with a lot to say, and a few stealthy housecats who may or may not be slightly domesticated. For sixty years a beaver colony has maintained a large lagoon four blocks away. Deer occasionally graze across the property down to the water’s edge, where they commune with ducks, crows, woodpeckers, bald eagles, wading birds like herons and cranes, and the ubiquitous seagulls, who seem to enjoy absolutely everything they eat. Feel free to feed your table scraps to the gulls. They will thank you with deafening enthusiasm. THE WATER LIFE Low tide reveals a rich array of marine animals on the exposed tide-flats, from starfish and eels to sea urchins, burrowing shrimp, squid, several species of crab, and a wide range of shellfish including oysters and clams. Trout fishing can be rewarding, but the perch and sole are generally too small to eat - or at least, too small to constitute a meal. This doesn’t discourage packs of seals who cruise the inlet occasionally, heaving themselves up onto floats at dusk before they hunt through the night, splashing and grunting until dawn. On one excursion our rowboat was even surprised by a whale who surfaced alongside to inspect us, exhaling mightily and spouting geysers of the worst bad breath in the world. THE BEAVER DAM Beavers began building a dam across a small creek in the 1950’s, back into the woods opposite the turn-off to Treasure Island, where they flooded two or three acres and moved right in. This drowned all the trees in the new pond and left a ghost forest rising out of the water, an eerie stand of dead whitened firs that stood for years before rotting out and toppling over. The owners breached the dam once or twice, but the beavers always returned and rebuilt it. Eventually the humans gave up and left the place alone. The beavers themselves usually stay out of sight. On rare occasions I’ve seen them at twilight, swimming back and forth 20 or 30 feet out with just their heads above water, either keeping a close eye on me or – in one case – studiously averting his gaze and insisting that I wasn’t there at all, and he wasn’t paying me the slightest attention. Beavers have their own sense of cool. Guest access Guests enjoy full access to everything on the lot except the cabin's second floor (which is sealed off) and a storage shed up a path into the woods. Other things to note There is no WiFi and no TV. But we do stock a full range of kitchen tools. The nearest town is Belfair, 8 miles north, which is home to gas stations, supermarkets, a laundromat, a library, and many fine restaurants and coffee kiosks.