Full Circle on Portage Bay: A Conversation with Ecco Design

Full Circle on Portage Bay: A Conversation with Ecco Design

Twenty-five years ago, Troy Hussing founded Ecco Design with a fairly narrow specialty: shoreline restoration and overwater permitting. It's the kind of niche that doesn't sound glamorous on paper — a lot of code research, agency coordination, and figuring out how to build responsibly on water. But Troy spent those early years building out exactly that side of the business, and it turned out to be the firm's long-term advantage.

John Pasco joined Ecco twenty years ago as a project architect, brought on to work on residential design. The two sides of the practice — Troy's shoreline and permitting knowledge, John's residential design eye — ran alongside each other for a while before converging. About fifteen years ago, the two started taking on floating home projects together, and it's easy to see why the fit made sense: a floating home is, in a lot of ways, exactly where shoreline permitting and residential design have to meet.

For Pasco, the connection to floating homes goes back even further, on a personal level. As a student in an architecture studio at the University of Washington in the 1990s, he was assigned a Portage Bay floating home as a design project — reimagining a home that already existed, working within its real constraints rather than a blank lot. It stuck with him as one of the most enjoyable studios he took in school.

The interesting part is what happened decades later: Ecco recently completed an actual redesign of that same Portage Bay home, with construction wrapping up this year. Not a similar house, not a home like it — the same one he studied as a student. It's a small full-circle moment, but it says something about how long this world is: the docks, the homes, and the people who work on them tend to stay connected over the long run.

Designing Within the Lines

Ask Pasco what makes floating home design different from a typical residential project, and the answer isn't really about aesthetics — it's about constraints. Every moorage has its own homeowners' association rules, and those are often stricter than what the city requires. Combine that with the naturally limited footprint most floating homes have to work with, and space planning has to be deliberate from the very first sketch.

Scale is a recurring theme, too. Many docks have established view corridors that determine where a second floor can go and how much of it is allowed. It's a limitation, but Pasco sees it as a good one — it keeps proportion and sightlines intact across a whole moorage, not just for one owner's benefit. He points to a project where a family needed more space and wanted rooftop area, resulting in a boxier, two-story home. It worked because all twenty homes on that dock were roughly the same scale. On a different dock, the same design might have stuck out.

One project Ecco is particularly proud of is a rebuild at Salix Moorage, where the existing float was kept but nearly the entire home above it was replaced. The owners wanted to hold onto outdoor space on every side while adding a partial upper level — a balancing act between the homeowners' vision, city requirements, and HOA review. The owners later wrote:

"Ecco Design brought both expertise and creativity to the rebuild of our floating home. They expertly navigated the arduous permitting process required for our increasingly complex water site, and their clever design choices let us maximize every inch within our existing float's footprint. The result is a truly special end-of-dock home... We couldn't be happier..."

The Timeline Is the Hard Part

If there's one thing Pasco wishes more homeowners understood going in, it's timeline. Floating home permitting has built-in review periods that simply can't be rushed, no matter how motivated the homeowner or how ready the architect. His advice for anyone starting to dream about a remodel: know your HOA or condo board rules first, bring a contractor into the conversation early, and work with an architect who's already fluent in the particular procedures floating home projects require.

That last point comes up again and again in client feedback. A homeowner who worked with Ecco across three separate projects — a studs-out remodel, a new home built from scratch, and a shoreline street-end remediation — put it simply: "They're the experts when it comes to on-water and waterfront permitting and design." Another client, who rebuilt a Portage Bay Place home this year, credited the firm's relationships as much as their design sense, describing how Ecco navigated "multiple HOA re-designs, the ins and outs of all the permits, coordinating with the builders, and even contending with the Historical Society and old city records" — largely, she said, because they knew the players personally.

Where Things Are Headed

Floating homes follow the same energy and mechanical codes as any other residential construction, so efficiency has crept in the same way it has everywhere else — better insulation, better equipment. But Pasco is watching solar in particular. Most floating homes, especially two-story ones with flat roofs, have good solar access, and he's seen more clients add PV systems as the cost comes down and battery backup becomes more practical.

He also expects renovation, not new construction, to keep defining this world. Moorage space in Seattle is finite, so most of the activity Ecco sees is homeowners updating what's already there — work that keeps these historic communities intact while bringing them up to modern standards of comfort. Given how much of Ecco's own history winds back through these same docks, that continuity feels fitting.