In Geneva, the deck is the front row seat. This hillside community at the north end of Lake Whatcom, just outside Bellingham off Lakeway, is organized entirely around the water — and on lots that slope hard toward it, the deck is often the only flat outdoor space a house has. Alpine Exteriors builds decks in Geneva that solve the hillside and celebrate the lake, on structures engineered for a neighborhood where every board lives in lakeside humidity.
Building on the Geneva Hillside
Flat lots are the exception here. Most Geneva homes step down their parcels toward the shoreline, which makes deck building a structural exercise before it is a design one. We set engineered footings into the slope, size posts and beams for real spans instead of wishful ones, and design multi-level layouts that follow the grade — an upper deck off the main floor, stairs wrapping down to a lower terrace, and the whole assembly braced for the loads a tall structure carries. A hillside deck that bounces or sways was under-built on day one; ours do neither.
Trees complicate things beautifully. Geneva's firs and cedars are half the neighborhood's charm and all of its shade problem, dropping needles onto deck surfaces that already dry slowly in lake air. We design around significant trees rather than against them, and we choose surfaces that tolerate the litter.