We just got the building permit approved for Beacon Green Courtyard Townhomes. Beacon Green is an entirely new townhouse archetype that addresses two
of the most difficult issues to resolve successfully in small scale
multi-family housing:
1) How to reasonably accommodate automobile
parking while mitigating impacts on open space, livability, and overall project
aesthetics?
2) How to create housing that encourages
community & provides a place for neighbors to meet, gather, and strengthen
social ties?
The typical
Seattle townhouse is designed around a central parking court that consumes the majority
of the site area for automobile maneuvering and is devoid of human activity. We used the flexibility of Seattle's new
multi-family code and streamlined design review program to push the buildings to
the perimeter of the site, put our parking in garages between the buildings, and
then cover the parking areas with a courtyard lid.
It took a couple hundred hours of extra work to get through various bureaucratic roadblocks that come along with doing a first-of-its-kind project. Once this goes to market and gets seen seen by the community at large, we believe that other developers will want to emulate it, and the city will make the necessarily accommodations to allow projects like this to proceed as smoothly as any other townhouse project.
Project features include:
- The
courtyard brings natural light into the center of the project, provides a
large commons for all of the residents, and provides a gracious means of
accessing the units in the rear of the site.
- The
visual impact of the automobile is greatly reduced, and the amount of open
space is more than doubled compared to a conventional townhouse.
- The
project fits six units onto what is typically a 4 unit site, providing
smaller, more affordable units than a conventional townhouse project.
- Some garage levels are flexibly configured to allow the alternative of a full size garage, a Smart car garage with one bedroom, or no garage and two bedrooms. The sales offering will market these units with a Smart car included.
