The Roost Lofts Receives AIA Seattle’s Honor Awards - Award of Merit

 

For the second time in less than a week, Neiman Taber has been recognized with a design award. We are proud to announce that The Roost Lofts just received the Award of Merit at the 2022 AIA Seattle Honor Awards for Washington Architecture.

The entirety of the awards ceremony can be watched at this link. (The discussion of The Roost starts at 48:13.) Of the project, the jury said:

“The Roost is a model for creating affordable housing in an urban core with no public subsidies. This project is rethinking our living environment. It’s providing affordable units while introducing an innovative housing typology…you have gone above and beyond to stay with a project, persist with a project…this a project that we have a team who has deeply invested in prototyping a way forward for housing and we just found it to be exemplary.”

The Roost is an innovative microhousing development, providing affordable market-rate housing aimed at strengthening Seattle’s arts community. The project combines inexpensive market-rate units, 40% AMI affordable units, and a below market-rate commercial space leased to an arts nonprofit. The housing units are supplemented with shared community kitchens, living, dining, and meeting spaces that improve the livability of the small apartments and provide an opportunity for residents to meet, interact and build community.

Wearing three hats — developer, designer, and operator, we successfully prototyped an innovative housing model that is profitable, affordable, sustainable, community-oriented, and replicable. The project was built for $150K per unit, total project cost including land. The 33 individual units are designed to function as live-work studios. To separate the bed space from the work area, we made each of the units double-height and lifted the sleeping area into a small loft. The vertical segregation of uses creates units that live like one-bedroom apartments, all in about 220 sf of space.

We are so pleased that the AIA Honor Awards jury recognized all the hard work that went into this project and how it addresses a critical issue in our community. For more information, please see:

2022 AIA Seattle Honor Awards Gallery

2022 AIA Seattle Honor Awards Roost Information Page

Neiman Taber Website: The Roost

The Roost Built Green 5-Star Certification

The Roost Neiman Taber Blog Summary