Surrounded by nature and filled with towering evergreens, Broadmoor is a special neighborhood in Seattle. With elegant, well-kept homes bordered by the Madison Park neighborhood as well as the Washington Park Arboretum, Broadmoor is built around one of Seattle’s most acclaimed golf courses, yet is very close to downtown.
The shore of Lake Washington is just a short walk away, and Bellevue and Redmond, cities filled with tech industry giants including Microsoft, are just a 15-minute drive across the Evergreen Point Bridge. For security’s sake, both the front and back entrances to the community are manned by guards.
In 1924, the Puget Mill Company dedicated 200 acres of old growth timber and rolling fields for the creation of a residential community amid an 18-hole golf course, which came to be known as Broadmoor. Today, the Broadmoor Golf Club is well known on the PGA Tour, and the Broadmoor enclave is home to some of Seattle’s largest estates and mansions, many of which sit right on the manicured fairways.
One of the earliest houses to be built in the neighborhood was for Edward and Josephine Nordhoff, who founded the Seattle-based department store The Bon Marché in 1890. The Nordhoffs invested their entire savings into merchandise for the store during its early years, while Josephine stocked shelves, kept the books, and cleaned the store; she later learned the Chinook language to wait on Native American customers. The Bon was a Seattle institution, with branches all across the northwest. The chain was purchased in 1989 by Federated Department Stores and by 2005 all the stores had been rebranded as Macy’s.
Getting back to the Nordhoffs, by 1927, the couple were rich, and they hired Spokane architect Kirtland Cutter to design a house for them in the fashionable Tudor style. Probably best known for designing Seattle’s Rainier Club, a snooty private social club in the heart of the financial district, Cutter also designed the Seattle Golf and Country Club and the Carnegie Camp North Point, the Adirondacks summer home of Lucy Carnegie.
Nearly 100 years later, the Nordhoff house was suffering a bit when tech mogul Kabir Shahani and wife Noreen purchased the property in 2013 for $1.775 million. They then hired architect Margaret Menter to update the house. Menter maintained the home’s historic details while incorporating gorgeous modern finishes. Nearly every inch was touched, every brick matched, and every detail meticulously crafted.
Newly listed by Shawn Filer and Eric Akines of Compass at $6.85 million, Nordhoff-Shahani Tudor may well be the best house in Broadmoor. In all, there are 5,972 square feet of space, with four bedrooms plus an office, and three and a half bathrooms. Stunning original glass, ironwork, and gold leaf trim complement a living room anchored by a delicately carved stone fireplace and an up-to-date eat-in kitchen filled with Calacatta marble. The office, with golf course views, sports hand-selected hardware from Paris in its custom cabinetry. And of course, there’s a media room with wet bar.
The overbuilt foundation walls cool the 3,000-bottle wine cellar, which includes a table and chairs for intimate dinners, and the house also boasts a guest apartment, for tiresome in-laws or rambunctious teens. The house sits on a double lot that borders the golf course, which makes one of the property’s more unique features also one of its most desirable: an approved safety net to protect the original glass windows and yard from rogue golf balls.
The Nordhoff’s old house is now all dressed up and ready for its next 100 years.