Sunny courtyard guest house in walkable neighborhood

Description

Hello! We are Jen and Owen Wozniak, respectively a teacher and a conservationist. We live in an old Victorian home in a charming and walkable inner Portland neighborhood. In 2016, we built a stand-alone guest house in our backyard for Owen’s mother, who lived in it for a time before moving to an independent living facility nearby. Our guesthouse is now available to rent and we've found we really like hosting academic-affiliated folks. We are looking for a tenant for the 2024-25 academic year but are open to a semester long rental as well. Dates are flexible. Our guesthouse is set back from the street in a beautiful landscaped courtyard. Enjoy off-street parking, a large common dining table overhung with cafe lights, landscaped natives beds, and a vegetable garden. While the courtyard is private from the street, it was designed to encourage connectivity and sociability with the main house and is frequently used by our family. The guesthouse has a small footprint but feels much larger inside. We designed it to be highly accessible and to maximize light. With four huge 8-foot-tall glass doors, the facade is basically a wall of glass (yes, there are curtains). All this glass, plus three skylights and a two-story soaring vaulted ceiling make the space feel exceptionally bright, airy, and much larger than its 640 sq. ft. A mature stand of 20 foot tall bamboo provides a screen from the neighbors, leafy views, and dappled light through the skylights. The main room is an open-plan combined kitchen, dining and living room with custom cabinetry, tile work, and paintings made by our friend, who teaches at Portland Community College. We outfitted the full kitchen with compact appliances, including a Frigidaire dishwasher, Summit refrigerator, and Blomberg gas range and oven. The expandable dining table seats 4 normally, 6 when pulled out for bigger gatherings. The ground floor master bedroom has a queen bed, stacked Blomberg washer-drier, full closet, and dresser. The bathroom has a custom tiled shower (no tub) and a pocket door. The upstairs loft has two single beds and a small dressing and sitting area. It is a private space, and a legal bedroom (including emergency egress window/skylight) but doesn’t have a door. It makes a great home office, kid bedroom, or main bedroom if you prefer. All areas of the guesthouse are ADA accessible except the loft. The guesthouse is fully furnished and supplied with kitchen wares, linens, and everything you need for a wonderful stay, whether that means reading all day in the courtyard, or cooking after a morning at the farmers’ market. We have wifi, but no television, which you won’t miss, because… We are on a residential street just a few blocks away from 28th Avenue and Burnside Streets, the center of a neighborhood rich with amenities Whole Foods Market and Laurelhurst Theater anchor the neighborhood. Restaurants, bars, food carts, and boutiques abound, (including Tusk, Boxer Ramen, Navarre, Angel Face, Guerro, Crema, and Fifty Licks, to name a few). Ken’s Artisan Pizza and Bamboo Sushi are a mere two blocks away. Close to parks, bus stops and bikeways (and a “Biketown" bike share station two blocks away), our neighborhood epitomizes “central.” We keep a binder of our favorite local spots to visit. Owen is a guidebook author and a fount of knowledge about Portland and Oregon. He loves to give recommendations and help with itineraries, both in town or further afield.