courtesy of pam walatkaDottie Portugal wanted to design herself a home, and at 94 she has made that dream a reality.

My brother and sisters and I recently traveled with our mother, Dottie Portugal, to Nicaragua to see the new beach house she designed.

Mom is 94.

This was her third trip to Nicaragua. One of her grandsons, Bodhi, has been living down there establishing a business, and she bought some land from him.

My twin brother, Peter, and his wife, Sue, went down a week ahead of us to help get the not-quite-finished house ready. Mom, my sister Nancy and I then flew to Nicaragua. The weather was hot but not too hot. We traveled four hours by taxi to Jiquilillo (“Hickey-leo”), a small, remote fishing village on the northwest coast.

Mom has always yearned to design a house and see it built – she should have majored in architecture, but that was not an option for most women in the 1930s (Julia Morgan notwithstanding). I remember watching her draw house plans, but Dad never wanted to move. There were times when projects got killed. The yearning survived.

In her 60s, 70s and 80s, Mom figured she had missed her chance to design a house. Her original dream was to build the family home. The house she did build is only 650 square feet and quite far away.

Last year, in her 90s, she purchased the beachfront lot and designed a vacation/rental home. She refined her concepts with Peter, who majored in architecture. He drafted her plans and worked with a contractor.

As we entered Jiquilillo, we saw the tangible fulfillment of Mom’s dreams – a beautiful beach house. It was everything we had hoped for, and then some.

“At age 94, I finally got to design and build a house, something I’ve wanted to do my whole life,” Mom told me. “True, the location is unexpected and the size is greatly diminished, but I’m very pleased with it. It works. It is functional and very pleasant to be in. I hope to spend a considerable amount of time there.”

Bodhi arrived with his girlfriend Sarita, who is the chef for their Nicaragua Escape surfer lodge. At night the elders, as Bodhi called us, got the beds and the youngers slept on mats on the floor.

The caretaker asked if we wanted her fisherman husband to catch us some fish for lunch, and we said yes. Fried fresh fish became the basis for most of our meals, along with “gallopinto,” a mixture of beans and rice, and Bodhi’s neverending supply of fresh fruit juice from his orchard.

We enjoyed being in the house. The ceilings are high and slanted – the roof is the ceiling. One big open space includes room for cooking, eating and hanging out. There is a bathroom with running water (most of the time). One bedroom has twin beds, the other has a queen and the big room has a futon. At night you can see the stars from any bed. The white stucco walls, the mahogany doors and trim, the high windows slanted to fit the roofline, the tile floors – they all come together beautifully. And the backyard is the ocean.

The following day we drove over to Bodhi’s place in the next village south. We stopped at a fisherman’s house and bought a bag of lobster tails for $8 – enough for nine people – and some cucumbers from a man with a donkey-pulled cart.

Chickens ran loose in Bodhi’s yard, as is the custom, and he complained that they ate his seedlings. Mom offered to take the chickens to her beach house. We ran around catching the hen and her four chicks, then held them until someone found a suitable container – a large open-weave plastic shopping tote.Mom carried the basket all the way home and laughed when she found chicken droppings in her lap.

Later that afternoon, Mom asked to see the village. We came to a bodega, which in this case means a hut-residence with a counter out front for selling rice, eggs, beans, pastries and beverages. We saw a few homes with walls, but most were thatched roofs reaching nearly to the ground and open at the bottom.

As we walked, people smiled at us and we smiled back. I pictured them thinking, “So these are the new neighbors.”

The next day, as we packed, Peter said, “Wait. Why are we leaving?” Mom realized she hadn’t been in the ocean yet, so we all went down there with her, cameras blazing.

On the way back to California, Mom said, “I always wanted to design a beautiful house, and now I have designed a beautiful house.”

The moral of the story? Keep your dreams alive. Who knows what, where, when or how they will materialize. Sometimes it takes a while to get to where you are going, and it might not be where you expected.

Pam Walatka is a longtime Los Altos Hills resident. Contact her at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

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