Change on Millionaire’s Row as Capitol Hill’s Shafer Baillie Mansion is sold

(Image: Shafer Baillie Mansion)

(Image: Shafer Baillie Mansion)

By Matt Dowell

Up on Capitol Hill’s Millionaire’s Row, a half-century old B&B in the 1910s-era Shafer Baillie Mansion has been put to rest.

Ana Lena Melka and Mark Mayhle, who’ve owned and operated the business for the last two decades, decided last year that they were ready to retire.

“I was just tired,” Melka told CHS. “We’ve been open year round for twenty years except when we took two weeks off to refinish all the wood floors and do all the carpets.”

They put the house at 14th and Aloha just down from Volunteer Park up for sale and stopped taking bookings after New Year’s Eve. A buyer materialized and the sale — for somewhere near its $5 million asking price — is pending.

Melka and family purchased the home in 2004, then spent years renovating, restoring it to its original charm where possible while modernizing many other aspects. It’s a pristine connection to Seattle’s past. But Melka feels its future as a B&B, and indeed as a historic mansion, is uncertain.

The mansion’s longtime stewards are part of Seattle property owners who say they are skeptical of the city’s new growth plans that call for increased density and multifamily homes on more corners of Seattle — even as they prepare to hand over their holdings to new generations.

“That gives you an idea what might happen to it,” Melka said.

The protections of 14th Ave E and Millionaire’s Row, however, are about as insulated from the city’s plans for new “Neighborhood Centers” and “Transit Corridors” as you can get.

The Shafer Baillie Mansion was built in the brick Tudor style by J.N. Johnson in 1913. Photos of Millionaire’s Row in that era show a street with much shorter trees, but many of the same gargantuan houses that remain today. Shafer Baillie measures 13,710 square feet with 12 bedrooms and 14 bathrooms across four stories and a basement.

The house was originally owned and occupied by Samuel Loeb, of the Independent Brewing Company, well-known at the time for its Old German Lager. Loeb sold the home to Scotsman Alexander Baillie in 1917 who, besides being president of the Rainier National Park Company and The Rainier Club, established the first golf course west of the Mississippi.

Julius Shafer, a Russian immigrant, bought the home in 1928. Shafer was a self-made businessman, an active member of the Jewish community, and “worked closely with immigrant placement during both WWI and WWII”, according to one source.

Shafer and family occupied the home through 1952, when Burell and Emma Johnson purchased the mansion and used it as a rooming house, then sold to Erv Olsen in the 1960s. Olsen opened the house to the public as a bed and breakfast in 1979.

With Melka and family’s restoration and preservation efforts, it has kept many features from 1913.

Besides the original mahogany and oak woodwork, light fixtures, and tiling, there are a number of items that you just don’t see in homes these days, like the plush fabric walls in one living room. In the master bathroom, there is a rib cage shower, which surrounds the user in a web of perforated pipes that shoot water onto the body at all angles. A number of satisfyingly sturdy tubs and sinks remain. Gone, though, is the pipe organ that once graced the third floor ballroom, now divided into guest rooms.

The rib cage shower

“The whole thing came about because of my husband,” Melka said.

In a 2020 Historic Seattle blog post she wrote, “After more than a year of house hunting across the Puget Sound region, we happened to walk past what looked like a haunted house in the Capitol Hill neighborhood and my husband said, ‘Now, if that house was for sale, I’d sell my soul to buy it!’”

Their family lived in the house for the first few years through a top-to-bottom restoration, then the reopening of the B&B.

“Everybody thought that we were crazy,” she said. But she’s glad they did it. “We’ve gotten to meet so many great people.”

The pipe organ from the third floor ballroom, which was gone before Melka and family took over

The connection to history is important to her. As is the community her family built around the B&B.

“It’s been really fun to get to know people from all over the world.”

“Repeat guests, some who’ve been coming since we opened, they get to be your friends more than your guests.”

She teared up talking about parents who stayed in the house while their children were sick and being cared for.

“We were talking to them when their kids were dying. They became family.”

The mansion has hosted many weddings over the years, for neighbors or otherwise. Once there was a Russian wedding with seven courses of food and especially ornate decor. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence helped celebrate another wedding in painted faces and nun costumes. Another time, a couple had been married at the zoo and showed up for their wedding night in a beautiful sari and kilt.

Photo from wedding attended by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence

“You do get to meet people and form friendships,” she said. “When we sent the message saying we planned to retire, we got so many emails, letters, and phone calls from people saying they wished us the best.”

“I would love for it to continue to be a B&B because I think it does provide a service to the community,” she said. “We’ve hosted lots of families from our neighborhood here.”

“It has served a purpose, especially with young people around who live in one bedroom apartments and have no place for their parents to stay.”

Millionaire’s Row, which features many of the largest homes in one of Washington’s wealthiest ZIP codes, has been immune to most change since its century-old homes were first built, even as nearby corridors were heavily developed. The street was added to the National Register of Historic Places in January 2021, though that distinction comes with no legal mandate for preservation. Several houses on the block are protected from change by Seattle Landmark status, including the Burwell House as of last year, though others are potentially more susceptible to redevelopment.

As she says goodbye to 14th Ave, Melka worries about Seattle losing touch with the past.

“When we were renovating the house, our painter said, ‘What do you think about converting it into a multifamily building? Gut the whole thing, make it into apartments?’”

“I’m not sure that’s respecting the history of the house,” she said.

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