The house with the T-Rex skeleton in the living room sits quietly on the Lake Washington shoreline in Medina, Washington, its walls of glass catching the afternoon light just enough to reveal the prehistoric outline inside. It belongs to a former Microsoft chief technology officer who parlayed a fascination with paleontology into one of the most unusual private collections in the Pacific Northwest. For anyone trying to understand what life actually looks like in Seattle’s most exclusive waterfront communities, that single detail says more than any price tag could. Matt Goyer, a Seattle-area real estate agent who has lived on the water for over a decade, spent a full afternoon on the lake, guiding a boat tour through Medina, Hunts Point, and Yarrow Point, three communities that represent the outermost edge of what Pacific Northwest real estate can cost and what it can offer.
Medina and its famous residents
Medina is home to roughly 3,000 people, and the median home price sits at $4.7 million. The most affordable listing on the water during the tour was a $7 million home with a satellite dish on the roof, a property most buyers would tear down to build new given how close it sits to the shoreline, grandfathered in under rules that no longer allow construction that near the water. A five-bedroom, 6,300-square-foot home with a long dock and a boat lift was listed at $13 million. The most expensive listing in Medina was $27 million, and notably, that one is not even on the water.
The neighborhood has almost no commercial space and is not particularly walkable, but it does have a small boutique grocery store at its center. Privacy is the main draw. Quiet streets, minimal public lake access, and a location just minutes from downtown Bellevue give residents seclusion without true isolation.
The homes that people slow down to look at from the water tell the community’s story. The house built by John and Deborah Bacon, whose family owns the conglomerate behind Value Village, occupies the southern tip of Grope Point. Purchased in 2011 for $15 million, it came with a demolished original structure and was rebuilt into a sprawling estate with a boathouse, a twisting water slide off the boathouse roof, a pool, and a rare sand beach. Sandy beaches on Lake Washington are unusual enough that Goyer singled it out as a genuine selling point.
Then there is the house known as the Windows 2000 house, built by one of the key architects behind Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. The local lore holds that the home was designed to have just under 2,000 windows, and a few were added to reach that number. A new wing has since been added, pushing the count well past that original target.
The T-Rex house belongs to Nathan Myhrvold, the former Microsoft chief technology officer who later wrote the multivolume culinary reference work ‘Modernist Cuisine.’ His foundation has recovered more T-Rex skeletons than almost any other private organization, donating nearly all of them to museums. He kept one for his home in Medina. Goyer noted the challenge of spotting it from the water: ‘You kind of have to catch it at the right light, because there’s so many windows and sometimes there’s too much reflection.’
Bill Gates’s estate, known as Xanadu, occupies a long stretch of the Medina shoreline. Just under 60,000 square feet, it was built back into the hillside, which makes it appear relatively modest from the water despite being the largest private home on the lake. Gates purchased the land in the 1980s for around $2 million and spent seven years building the house. The current appraised value on the county tax website is $140 million, with an annual tax bill of approximately $1 million. Inside, the property includes a trampoline room and a 60-foot pool with an underwater sound system.
Hunts Point and Yarrow Point round out the lake’s elite tier
Hunts Point, just east of Medina, is smaller and more expensive. Only about 500 people live there, and the median home price is $8 million. The cheapest home for sale during the tour was listed at $18 million. The most significant sale in the community’s recent history was the former Jeff Bezos home, which Bezos purchased in 2019 for $37 million and sold off-market for $63 million. The house, designed by the Seattle-based architecture firm Olson Kundig, was originally built for an early investor in Build-A-Bear who also founded a cruise line. The home has roughly 300 feet of waterfront footage, a sea plane dock, and was designed more as a private art gallery than a traditional residence.
The northern tip of Hunts Point saw a recent sale of $60 million, a record in the area until the Bezos sale eclipsed it. A former Kenny G home on the same stretch of lake is currently listed at $55 million. Its 17,000-square-foot manor includes a large dock, a sand beach, a caretaker’s house estimated at 3,000 to 4,000 square feet, and manicured lawns that serve as a counterpoint to the ultra-modern aesthetic of many nearby properties. The neighbor to the north is Steve Ballmer.
Yarrow Point sits just beyond Hunts Point and has a slightly different character. Around 400 homes, a median price near $4.5 million, some sidewalks, parks, and an annual Fourth of July parade give it more of a neighborhood feel. The most expensive listing there, and in the entire greater Pacific Northwest at the time of the tour, is a home called Triptych, listed at $79 million. Also designed by Olson Kundig, it stretches across three levels and just over 14,000 square feet of space, with a waterfront pavilion and extensive glass and concrete construction. Goyer called it ‘half art, half architecture.’
The Triptych pavilion at the water’s edge
A small pavilion sits at the end of the Triptych property where the lawn meets the lake, a concrete and glass landing point between the $79 million house behind it and the open water in front.
For buyers not in the market for nine-figure estates, Goyer noted that single-family homes on Lake Washington can be found in the $2 to $5 million range, and condos with lake access start around $500,000. The water, as it turns out, has a price point for almost everyone, just not the same one.
