TOUR STOP 1

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All aboard our 18-foot craft. We push off from the dock in the Leschi neighborhood of Seattle, named for a Salish Indian leader who was hanged by the city's founding pilgrims. Up the lake we go, gin and tonics all around, in the tradition of old Seattle wealth, which is where the tour begins. We are approaching the site of the mid-1990s Seattle celebrity triangle. But first, something nutritious. To the left of the gargantuan beige home, you can almost see the outlines of tiny Tudors, split-levels, and ranch houses of midlevel waterfront money, circa 1950. Nothing too gaudy or overstated, the architectural equivalent of plaid shirts before CEOs discovered them as a way to look normal. Seattle architecture has been through three phases. One borrowed from the East Coast, grafting Cape Cod-, Colonial-, and Craftsman-style dwellings to the steep hills of this city. Then, after World War II, a new generation of designers started to create something more suited to the climate and surroundings. These homes featured enormous windows and skylights to maximize daylight in ever cloudy Seattle, large overhanging eaves to keep the rain away, exposed posts and beams inside, and cedar shakes outside. This Northwest Style, to some critics, was a bit too beige and eco-friendly. Now a third phase, sometimes called Cyberbaronial but really a mishmash, has evolved. Mostly, this new look is about using advanced technology throughout the inside of the house, and is much showier on the outside than anything that came before it. The beige home is a Mediterranean-style villa owned by someone who made his money selling air--the cellular variety. Keith McCaw's 27,000-square-foot house has a slate roof, porticoed porch, and palm trees, all of which come in handy during the summer rainy season. Three waterfront homes were torn down to build this manse for the younger brother of Craig McCaw, who lives across the lake. Little-known fact: Just to the left of Keith's 240 feet of waterfront is a dinky little public beach. You can skinny-dip here and drink Rainier beer while singing "This Land Is My Land, This Land Is Your Land." But be discreet.

Behind McCaw's roost are two shrines--er, homes--shrouded by trees and much innuendo. One is a grunge-rock mecca, the other was built on coffee money. The home where Kurt Cobain took his life and the widow Courtney Love took a Vanity Fair reporter to see her new, surgically augmented breasts has been getting enough visitors to rival Lourdes, with fewer miracles. But enough is enough, so Love has recently sold the place for $2.9 million and moved to L.A. Ever the sentimentalist, Love, leader of the rock band Hole, retained the right to remove a young willow tree that was fertilized with Kurt's ashes. That property is connected by a sliver of a park to the home of Howard Schultz, the man who did for fresh-ground coffee what Ray Kroc did for ground beef. The park is called Viretta. After snoopy neighbors found out that some of the limestone driveway owned by the Emperor of Starbucks infringed on public space, a long and ugly fight ensued, complete with overwritten stories by investigative journalists and public hearings attended by people with too much time on their hands. The patch of grass has since been nicknamed Vendetta Park. Schultz is also moving, if he hasn't already.

TOUR STOP 2

A few docks to the north is the flat-roofed, beige trophy of a man who once epitomized 1980s Seattle excess. Martin Selig, developer, used to own half of all the office space in downtown Seattle, and he built the Columbia Tower--at 76 stories, it was the tallest building west of the Mississippi. He did more to change the face of Seattle, it was said, than anyone since Arthur Denny's day (the latter being among the people who were happy to see Leschi hanged and to take over the chief's former fish-drying grounds). Selig has since lost much of his empire. The house, for our purposes, serves as a focal point for a lesson on new and old Seattle. Behind it are the solid brick homes of solid brick Seattle families, many of whom are members of the nearby Seattle Tennis Club, an old-guard haunt. These homes used to border the water. Then, with the 1917 opening of a canal that connected Lake Washington to Lake Union and ultimately, through another canal, to Puget Sound, the water level of the lake fell by 9 feet. Further down the lake, this created a wondrous stretch of public beach, more than 3 miles long. Up here, it created a real-estate opportunity: new waterfront sold to people who built homes beneath the stately bricks.

TOUR STOP 3

The Seattle side of the lake has at least two other worthy stops. These apartment towers are what much of the Lake Washington shoreline would look like had not voters in Washington state approved a law more than 15 years ago that saved the state's lakes and Puget Sound from the forces of Fort Lauderdale-style development.

TOUR STOP 4

Just around the bend from the towers is Husky Stadium, one of only two football arenas in the country where fans can approach by water. During the fall rainy season, 73,000 people show up every game to watch the student-athletes of the University of Washington crush evil teams from California and Mormons from Provo. The Huskies represent Our Way of Life. So it was particularly hard to lose to the red-meat hulks from Nebraska last month. On the plus side, this is the only big-time local sports team that has not threatened to leave town unless taxpayers build them a new palace.

TOUR STOP 5

Here is a typical old Seattle guy on a midweek sail in his humble boat--wearing a life jacket, of course. And here is a basic Eastside boat, a 141-foot expression of the fruits of irrational exuberance. The lake itself is a remnant of the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago. It is 209 feet deep, and clean enough to swim in thanks to another voter-approved measure in the early 1960s which property-rights wackos would surely oppose now as an enviro-takings scheme.

TOUR STOP 6

To cut to the chase on the Eastside: Behold the modest nest of a fairly well-known computer-software executive--"a smart home that uses non-apparent technology and typifies the Pacific Northwest," in the owner's own words on CD-ROM. The principal architect, James Cutler, is well known in the Northwest School, building homes that seem to fit their settings. You can see the tour boat, from Argosy Cruises (206-623-4252), full of people hearing about details any Seattle schoolboy can recite: the trampoline, lap pool, parking garage for 20 autos, walls as video screens, Leonardo's Codex. Because there is a small salmon-spawning stream flowing from the compound, the owner can evoke state and federal laws which protect anadromous fish, and keep gawkers 200 feet away, if he wishes. There are four levels to the house, built on property which a Seattle family bought in 1933 for $720. The present owner paid a bit more. At just under 40,000 square feet, it's not a fixer-upper. But the White House is still bigger, at 67,000 square feet.

TOUR STOP 7

A neighbor to the south is Charles Simonyi, a software programmer, whose home is probably the penultimate in Cyberbaronial. The middle part, the accordion section, is tilted at a 7-degree angle. There's the obligatory indoor pool, energy-efficient technology (it turns the lights off after you leave the room), and a bed that rotates to face the best view of Mt. Rainier and the Olympic mountain range. Some people think this looks like an office park after an earthquake; others see flashcubes or dice. In any event, it is the exact opposite of this more traditional dwelling. The only problem here is the geese, who are drawn to lush, chemically fed lawns, which they use as poop pads.

TOUR STOP 8

Some homeowners have given up the grass thing altogether, to bring in so-called natural landscaping. Turd-dropping geese do not like this native grass nearly as much as they do chem-lawns. But for all its embrace of a natural ecosystem, this home has one dark little secret: the rocks out front are fake.

TOUR STOP 9

Around the turn and into Meydenbauer Bay we go, to the heart of Bellevue. Incorporated in 1953, Bellevue was little more than blueberry farms and timid ranch homes until white flight in the 1960s and '70s transformed it into the fourth-largest city in Washington. At the north end are some of the biggest homes on the lake.

TOUR STOP 10

On the other end of the lake are people trying to live within the confines of nature and new laws to protect nature. See the tree growing through one home, and next door, through the deck. See the floatplane on the dock. You are no longer in Fort Lauderdale.

TOUR STOP 11

For years, ferries connected Seattle to its east side, landing at Mercer Island, Medina, and Kirkland. Then, in the early 1940s, the world's first floating concrete bridge opened, linking south Seattle to Mercer Island with this waterborne section of Interstate 90. This was followed by the Evergreen Point Bridge, connecting Seattle to Bellevue, a 1.4-mile span which is said to be the world's longest floating bridge. All the superlatives meant little, however, during the winter rainy season in 1990, when some guy working on the bridge left the hatches open.

As a storm muscled its way across the lake, water filled the pontoons, and part of the bridge sank. The response from the Eastside, at least among the young, was fairly uniform: Cool.

TOUR STOP 12

Well to the south of both bridges, on Mercer Island, is the other modest home of a major computer-software mogul--the one who doesn't own Slate. Paul Allen's place is a hard thing to classify. It's been called Scandinavian-influenced. But it is the rare Swede who has a National Basketball Association-regulation-sized gym (for his NBA team, the Portland Trailblazers, who once played a scrimmage here), a dormitory, a dock for a just-purchased 190-foot yacht, a library that would make Carnegie blush, and a home for Mom. Allen has become something of a cottage collector, buying in New York, the San Juan Islands, and Beverly Hills, among recent acquisitions. He's unmarried, so perhaps he needs the space for his dirty socks.

TOUR STOP 13

Across the water from Allen is a little piece of original Lake Washington shoreline. Seward Park is what this area looked like when Leschi and Sealth (after whom Seattle is named) roamed the land. It has 1,000-year-old cedar trees, 500-year-old Douglas firs, a fish-spawning channel, great blue herons, and a nesting pair of bald eagles--at the center of a metropolitan area of 1.7 million people. The land used to be an island, which saved it from lazy early loggers. Then, when the lake level was lowered, it acquired a land bridge.

TOUR STOP 14

But, of course, many people prefer the other view of Seattle, after they leveled the hills and latched a skyline to them. It is seen here from Lake Union, where the Tom Hanks character lived on a houseboat in Sleepless in Seattle. Inevitably, as we head back to shore, many people feel a twinge of envy. It may help to remember these people live under a volcano (Mount Rainier) and over an earthquake fault. A few years ago, geologists discovered that a huge fault line was running right across the middle of the lake, bisecting the priciest real estate on the Eastside and in Seattle. There are still petrified trees at the bottom of the lake, knocked down the last time the fault slipped. If it were to move again, there's no telling how much cyberbaronial excess would go to a watery grave. Then people would tour Lake Washington for the same reason that they now go just south of the lake--to the ground where Jimi Hendrix is buried.