For more than 16 years, people near and far have rented the Vashon Park District’s beloved Belle Baldwin house as a one-of-a-kind vacation experience, paying $290 a night to stay at the historic white-washed home perched above Fern Cove.

The rental program came to a sudden halt in June, however, after the park district learned that its use of the three-bedroom house as a vacation rental violated the terms of the state program used to help purchase the historic property 30 years ago.

According to the minutes from the park district’s June 11 meeting, Elaine Ott-Rocheford, the park district’s executive director, told the five-member board: “We need to stop Airbnb, VRBO, and promoting on our website immediately.”

The district is now working with Vashon HouseHold to see if it can take a new direction. Though an agreement has yet to be signed, the park district expects to offer the home as a long-term, below-market rental to a person or family in Vashon HouseHold’s Home Share Program. The rental will carry light care-taking duties, such as shutting the gate at the top of the driveway each night, Ott-Rocheford said.

“My board felt that this is a good opportunity to give back to the community,” she said.

The state Recreation and Conservation Office — which oversees contracts such as the one used to purchase Fern Cove in 1993 and notified the park district late last year that it was out of compliance — has approved this change of use, Ott-Rocheford said. But the discovery that the rental program violated the 30-year-old contract and the process of coming to terms with the state’s notification has been hard, Ott-Rocheford said.

“It’s disappointing, to be honest. (The Belle Baldwin house) has been a wonderful resource to the community. … But I think the commissioners did their best … to turn it into something that is a different type of resource. Making it a part of an affordable housing program is a nice way to resolve this situation,” she said.

Josh Henderson, a board member, called the conversion to a long-term, below-market rental “a win-win. … This use of that asset as an affordable rental is more in line with our values than a vacation rental.”

He, too, though, said he was disappointed and surprised by this turn of events. “From what Elaine told me, it was just an oversight. But I remained baffled about how this happened. I’m just going to assume human error. None of us is perfect.”

Susan Zemek, a spokesperson for the state Recreation and Conservation Office (RCO), said it wasn’t clear how no one in her office discovered the park district’s lack of compliance for several years. The state agency recently added staff to ensure contract compliance and thus has begun to increase routine compliance checks.

“It was probably an oversight on our part — so that’s our mistake. When we did find it, we started to work with the park district to address the problem,” Zemek said.

The change in use will have a small impact on the park district’s 2024 budget. The state has allowed the district to honor rentals for the rest of the year but refused the park district’s request to fill in the rental gaps with additional rentals over the next few months, Ott-Rocheford said. As a result, the district expects to lose about $26,000 in revenue, profits from the rental program.

The park district hopes to begin its long-term rental of the house in January 2025. A monthly rental price hasn’t been determined, Ott-Rocheford said. “We’re working that out with Vashon HouseHold,” she said.

The Belle Baldwin house sits by itself at the north side of Fern Cove, a 13.5-acre nature preserve that includes forested trails, a habitat-rich estuary and a quiet, expansive beach beloved by walkers and birders.

Baldwin was the Washington Territory’s first female physician — she moved to the property in 1908 after her father, also a physician, died and left the property to Baldwin and her mother. She and her mother had the house built in 1912; Belle Baldwin lived there for 30 years.

The house was designed by acclaimed Seattle architect Harlan Thomas, known for his design of the Sorrento Hotel, in the Georgian Revival Style — beveled siding, a truncated hip roof, and a prominent, oversized porch — according to HistoryLink.org.

Islanders began working to protect Fern Cove in the early 1990s after a couple who was living in another home on the site (since torn down) approached Vashon’s conservation community to see if the property could become a nature preserve and environmental learning center.

Friends of Fern Cove formed to advocate for the property. Other islanders took a lead role in finding grant money, including Dave Warren, who headed the Vashon-Maury Land Trust at the time; Emma Amiad, then the chair of the park district, and Joel Kuperberg, a conservation leader who died in 2004. According to a commentary in The Beachcomber in 2008, the grant proposal they presented to the state in 1993 was ranked first out of 23 projects statewide.

Under the terms of the contract, the property could not be owned by the Land Trust — it had to be owned by a public agency — so the park district agreed to take it on, with the Land Trust acting as a conservation partner and manager, Warren said. The park district purchased the property in September 1994, and in 1995, the house was designated as a King County Historic Landmark.

After the property was in Vashon Park District ownership, Amiad said the park district had to put thousands of dollars into the house to repair it — removing an old oil tank, repairing the roof and more. “We did everything that needed to be done, and we did it correctly,” Amiad said.

An elderly woman who had worked for Baldwin lived there at the time of the purchase; it wasn’t until she moved to a nursing home that talk shifted to renting the house as a vacation rental, Amiad recalled. But neither Warren, Amiad, nor Wendy Braicks, who was the executive director of the park district when the house became a rental, remember any restrictions on the use of the property.

“I never heard any kind of restriction in the use of the property,” Amiad said.

Braicks agreed: “I had no idea,” she said.

When the park district decided to convert it to a vacation rental, they again invested in the house — spending $140,000 to update the kitchen and bathroom, redo the plumbing and wiring, reglaze the windows and purchase high-quality beds and other furnishings, according to past Beachcomber reports.

The three-bedroom house entered the vacation market in 2008 with some fanfare. A story in the Seattle Times, written by islander Kathryn True, was headlined “The Belle of the bay,” and a story in Cascade PBS (formerly Crosscut), written by islander Dan Chasan, called it “an idyllic Vashon escape.”

Online reviewers gushed. “A great place to get away from the rush of modern life and just breathe,” wrote a guest in 2020.

Ott-Rocheford said she was shocked when she learned last November that it appeared the park district’s use of the house was out of compliance. In meeting minutes from Nov. 14, 2023, she told her board: “I have spent hours poring over every document, and I cannot come up with anything that says RCO is wrong.”

Since then, Ott-Rocheford said, she discovered that the particular grant used to buy the property in 1994 — a grant specifically targeted for wildlife and habitat protection — carried a requirement that all structures had to be removed or demolished within three years unless the agency could show that the structure supported its programming for the site.

Over the past several months, Ott-Rocheford said, “we’ve gone round and round about what an acceptable use might be.” Should they tear down the house? Could they funnel the grant money towards another project? Could they start a new kind of program there, using the property to house researchers or interns working for the land trust or other groups?

The commissioners decided a caretaker made the most sense — they already have experience with a caretaker arrangement at Point Robinson, another park district property — and in July the park district submitted an “allowable use request” to the RCO. A caretaker, the park district said in its application, “will daily open and close the gates to the parking lot and the property …; walk the trails to pick up litter, and ensure the property is free of overnight campers.” On Aug. 1, RCO approved the park district’s request.

In June, the park district removed the Belle Baldwin house from its website and vacation rental platforms. Asked why they didn’t notify the community that the house was no longer available, commissioners said they were waiting until the situation was more fully resolved.

“Our meetings are open. Our minutes are posted. We don’t have a huge marketing arm,” added Sarah George, who chairs the board. “There’s an awful lot happening. We’re doing the best we can.”

As for the decision to move forward with a tenant selected by Vashon HouseHold, commissioners said they see it as the best possible outcome for a beloved property.

“In a very small way, we’re adding to the stock of affordable housing on the island,” said Hans Van Dusen, another commissioner.

Few islanders actually stayed at the Belle Baldwin house, he noted. It was largely a resource for off-islanders: “I think every board has wrestled with why we’re in the vacation house business. It’s not our core mission.”

Jason Johnson, Vashon HouseHold’s executive director, said his board will decide later this month whether to develop an agreement with the park district and move forward on seeking a tenant. The Home Share Program — which matches tenants with landlords who have certain requests or needs — makes sense in this situation, he said. “This seems to lend itself well to that program,” he said.

“I believe that someone’s income or fiscal reality shouldn’t eliminate them from living in a beautiful, unique, or special place,” he added. “It’s an incredible opportunity for us to increase the availability of affordable housing on Vashon. And it’s also an incredible opportunity for someone who otherwise wouldn’t have this opportunity to live right on the water.”

George, the park district’s chair, agreed. “What’s the most good we can do in this situation? I think this is a positive way to move forward.”

What it means for visitors to Fern Cove is not yet clear, commissioners added. The trails and beach that make up the preserve will still be accessible, but the house itself will likely be off-limits. Van Dusen, though, said he hopes a picnic table can be perched at the end of the grassy lawn or nearby on the beach, affording views of the historic home.

“I want to maintain the public’s access to the property, even if there’s a caretaker there,” he said.

Leslie Brown is a former editor of The Beachcomber.