By KATY MULDOON
The Oregonian

PACIFIC CITY (AP) — Dream homes, naturally, begin with dreams. In this one, fund-raisers dreamed of donors with deep pockets. Landowners dreamed of sharing their good fortune. Architects dreamed of uplifting ambiance. Townspeople dreamed of being top-notch neighbors.

And the parents of a small but powerful girl wondered — loud enough for fund-raisers, landowners, architects and townspeople to hear — whether, one day, families like theirs might make indelible memories spending time away together in a dream home unlike any other retreat in the West.

All that, though, is history: pie-in-the-sky stuff that Cliff and Regina Ellis tossed around a decade ago.

Today, their dream is all shingles and glass and stone, all angles and light — and it’s almost ready for families with critically ill children to occupy.

The Ellises, who founded the nonprofit Children’s Cancer Association 10 years ago, call their dream home the Caring Cabin. They expect that this month, the first families will begin using the nearly $1.2 million getaway, offered to them at no cost.

Alexandra Ellis insisted on leaving the doors to her rooms open, so that other children at Doernbecher and Legacy Emanuel children’s hospitals could join her tea parties. She’d make friends in a snap and invite them home just as quickly.

Long-legged, blue-eyed and blonde, before she lost her hair, Alex fought neuroblastoma, cancer that attacks the nervous system. Sick for nearly half her short life, she endured surgeries, radiation and chemotherapy. Generations of her family were at her bedside when she died on May 7, 1995, at home in Southwest Portland.

Alex was 5 years old.

A few weeks later, Cliff and Regina Ellis took a cue from their daughter. They invited family, friends and a few folks they barely knew for dinner. Pasta filled plates. Wine spilled into glasses. And a question was served:

“How,’’ Regina Ellis remembers asking her guests, “can we help other families who have to get through this?’’

Clare Hamill was at the Ellises’ dinner table that evening.

Hamill was the Nike executive — today the company’s vice president of new business development — who’d heard through an acquaintance about a little girl with a big wish: Before she died, Alex Ellis wanted to swim with dolphins in Hawaii.

Struggling to pay their daughter’s medical bills, Alex’s parents couldn’t afford to make that one dream come true. But Hamill, who had a 3-year-old daughter of her own, found that in her heart, she couldn’t afford not to.

She dialed Nike colleagues and other connections, and arranged for flights, a hotel and a rental car. Hamill met Regina Ellis for the first time the day she delivered the tickets to the family’s home.

“It makes you realize,’’ Hamill says, “that you can make such a big difference by just saying, ‘Yes.’’’

Caring for a critically sick child, the Ellises had learned which parts of the medical system worked smoothly and which didn’t for families such as theirs. They’d discovered the gaps in social services. They’d felt the exhaustion that accompanies rounds of treatment and relapses.

They learned, too, how much it meant when friends offered mountain cabins or beach houses, so their family could unhook physically and mentally from the intravenous poles and exam rooms and have a couple days, Regina Ellis says, “just to exhale.’’

So when the Ellises proposed starting a foundation to fill in the gaps, including building a retreat for families, Clare Hamill said yes, of course she’d help.

She signed on as the Children’s Cancer Association’s founding president and used her energetic, mile-a-minute style to rally business partners and civic leaders around the fledgling organization.

Paul and Tasca Gulick spotted the query in the Children’s Cancer Association newsletter — the one wondering whether anyone might have land to donate for a respite cabin.

“It just immediately hit us,’’ says Paul Gulick, chief executive officer of Visual Clarity Systems, headquartered in Wilsonville.

The Gulicks owned 24 acres just north of Pacific City in Tillamook County. There, deep woods sheltered a small, placid lake a mile from the beach. Up the hill, a landing would make a picturesque home site.

Now, the Caring Cabin will give families a break from the arduous routines that accompany a child’s grave illness.

Starting on a shoestring budget a decade ago, the Children’s Cancer Association has a $2 million operating budget this year. With a staff of 15 and more than 800 volunteers, the association serves more than 12,000 children and their families each year.

“When you realize what they’ve accomplished,’’ Paul Gulick says, “ … it makes you want to help out any place you can.’’

He and his wife signed over the title to their land.

“We all go about our lives,’’ Bob Thompson says, “taking for granted our health and our families.’’

As he speaks, the design principal at Thompson Vaivoda and Associates Architects Inc. unrolls drawings and spreads them across a table in his downtown Portland office.

Dazzling photographs of the firm’s work adorn the walls. Among the designs are the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, Calif.; Ericsson’s North American headquarters in Plano, Texas; downtown Portland’s soaring Fox Tower; and the edgy Nike World Campus near Beaverton.

But the drawings on the table are much smaller in scale. They depict 3,900 square feet of polished concrete pillars, open timbers and floor-to-ceiling windows where light and nature itself seem to spill in.

The kitchen opens onto a dining space and living room with a basalt fireplace so beefy that a sizable child could stand in the wood-storage cubbies. Four bedrooms. A game room. A meditation pavilion. Wheelchair-accessible bathrooms, wiring for hospital beds and space for medical oxygen tanks.

The role of the house, says Thompson, who worked on the design with his associate John Heili, is to lift its occupants’ spirits.

In Pacific City, the ideas roll in, says Mary Baggett-Smith, a merchant who leads a committee of townsfolk working to unfurl the welcome mat at the cabin.

Baggett-Smith moved to Pacific City nine years ago, when she retired from teaching. The cabin, she says, has found a town that may be a perfect fit.

“This place brings peace to my soul,’’ she says, “and I think it does to other people, too.’’

In the years since Alex Ellis died, her parents have divorced. They remain partners, though, when it comes to keeping her spirit alive.

Regina Ellis runs the Children’s Cancer Association in Southwest Portland, while Cliff Ellis watches over the cabin construction at the coast. Every few months, when Regina drops by the construction site, “It takes my breath away,’’ she says, “to think of the families who will share it.’’

It takes her breath away, too, when she considers how the power of Alex’s story has opened opportunities and wallets, or, as she puts it, “one spark, fueled by thousands of hearts.’’

“There is no way,’’ she says, “that this project would be opening its doors without the collective effort of hundreds and hundreds of people.’’