SEAVIEW -- The Sou'Wester Lodge is more a cultural phenomenon than a hotel, and 77-year-old Len Atkins, trekking about his property in a colorful robe, his wild mane of gray hair streaming behind, is more of a guru of enlightenment than an innkeeper.

Passion is what he preaches.

BRIAN J. CANTWELL / THE SEATTLE TIMES

Len Atkins with some of the vintage trailers he rents to guests on the back lot at Seaview's Sou'Wester Lodge. Tongue firmly in cheek, he calls this part of his compound "TCH! TCH!" He says the letters either stand for "Trailer Classics Hodgepodge," or when pronounced together with a clucking tongue, "such poor taste!"

Each guest, as they were checking out yesterday, got his gentle but persistent quizzing about who they were and the passion in their life.

"So you prostitute yourself but you still have the writing you do for you, for your passion," he summarized to a young man who said he writes "advertorials" but hinted that he also is working on something more literary.

Yep, said the guest, who'd just spent a night in a classic 1950s trailer on the Sou'Wester's back lot, just one of the diverse lodging choices here.

Since Len, a former child psychologist, and his wife, Miriam, also 77, came from Chicago in 1980 and took over the Sou'Wester, the one-time coastal estate of U.S. Sen. Henry Winslow Corbett of Oregon, they've built the 115-year-old, slightly down-at-its-heels inn into a vehicle for cultural interaction, artistic expression, performance, recitation, intellectual debate and, often, friendship.

It started years ago with what Len calls Fireside Evenings in the lodge, sparked by a guest from Seattle, then director of the Northwest Chamber Orchestra, who admired the large living room as a wonderful place for chamber music. So she organized a recital.

"From that, some people who attended said, 'We have some recorders and a portable harpsichord' -- so they had an evening," Len recalled. "Then someone in that audience said, 'We have flutes!' So it just kept rolling on!"

From the performance evenings grew another kind of occasional happening at Sou'Wester: the TeaCup T'ink Tank, which Len explains is "not quite a think tank!"

Len, a devoted student of Plato, treads a delightfully slippery slope between waggish sense of humor (he respects "the Alfred E. Neuman in all of us") and poetic turn of phrase, which he articulates in clipped consonants and elegantly rounded vowels reflecting his upbringing as a South African Jew (who later studied psychology on a kibbutz in Israel).

A homespun pamphlet describes his T'ink Tanks as cultural ("devoted to the straightforward dissemination of knowledge in the arts, literature, philosophy, science, etc., led by experts in the field"); dialogs ("the respectful exchange of differing opinions sincerely held"); or "diatribalogs" ("the not necessarily respectful exchange of differing opinions passionately held").

T'ink Tanks started with a lodge guest, an expert on Charles Dickens, giving a talk. Another brought local people and architects and engineers together to talk about what Seaview had to offer and how to protect it.

"For many of us, living here is a spiritual experience," Len said. And there is constant pressure on the historic neighborhoods. So far, Seaview has resisted the kind of modern commercial development near the dunes that is happening in nearby Long Beach.

"Every three months, we have developers come by, telling us how much we could get" if he and Miriam sold out, Len lamented.

BRIAN J. CANTWELL / THE SEATTLE TIMES

Len looks over an illustrated journal in one of his lodge rooms, in front of artwork by a guest who stayed in the room.

If and when the lodge goes, the loss will be far more than a building. Over 27 years, the couple has decorated every wall with artwork made by lodge guests both famous and not so, much of it donated or bartered for. When Len gives a tour of lodge rooms, he's like a museum curator lovingly showing off his collection. He's fond of the three William Cumming paintings in the living room, by the last surviving member of the Northwest School of Art, who is 90 this year and a longtime lodge guest and friend. Upstairs, he stops and points here, there and everywhere and remembers the guest who created the artwork.

The most recent cultural event was an evening with jazz guitarist John Stowell of Portland, who traveled with one of the first American jazz quartets through the Soviet Union shortly before its breakup. Len lets local people know about such gigs and sometimes tells the local newspaper in advance. He charges no admission, other than perhaps a food bank donation or a hat put out, disdaining the business aspect of such things.

"Here we had maybe 17 or 25 people lolling about listening to a guy perform who in the Soviet Union performed before groups of maybe 5,000 people. The wonderful thing, it is totally removed from the hurly burly of the church of commerce. No money changes hands, whatever."

As long as Len and Miriam have the Sou'Wester, Seaview has a cultural gem money can't buy.