seattle neighborhood residential

Green Zoning means going beyond detached houses and townhouses, to a more urban, green residential type. Let’s trade the sideyard for a backyard with more homes facing the street with a useable yard. The typical setbacks on narrow, deep lots force townhomes to be perpendicular to the street and facing useless sideyards.

• Reduce front yard setback and eliminate side setback

• Porches and balconies can extend in front

• Max. depth 50% of the lot, apartments with window on street and larger backyard

• A compact form is easy to build and energy efficient

• Space for 3-10 households per parcel

• Works for larger units - less floor area wasted on stairwells

• Backyard trees remain

If we want to crack the housing crisis, ADUs aren’t enough. We need a repeatable adaptable accessible single-stair, #Passivhaus 6/8/10plex that can be financed, permitted, constructed nearly everywhere on a margin that makes it more profitable than townhomes or detached homes.

CAST ARCHITECTURE’s AWARD-winning Rainier Beach Urban farm ND WETLANDS

Rainier Beach Urban Farm and Wetlands Classroom Building has won an AIA Washington Council Civic Design Merit Award and an Honorable Mention from the AIA Seattle Honor Awards.

Rainier Beach Urban Farm and Wetlands (RBUFW) transformed a former City of Seattle seven-acre tree nursery into an urban agriculture center for a culturally diverse area of Seattle. Run by Tilth Alliance and Friends of Rainier Beach Urban Farm and Wetlands, the project inspires and educates people to safeguard our natural resources while building an equitable and sustainable local food system. Local food production for a neighborhood abundant with immigrant culture means refugees, who were forced to flee their homeland farms, now pass down food, farming traditions, and identity to the next generation through RBUFW. At the heart of the farm is the new Classroom Building. It brings together people from a full spectrum of cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds.

The building program was a result of a community-driven process that led to the design of a flexible gathering space and a commercial kitchen for community meals and cooking demonstrations. In addition to monthly community dinners, kid’s summer camps, and a pay-what-you-can farmstand, RBUFW hosts fresh food related programs for community-supported agriculture, gardening, beekeeping, and food production.

The Classroom Building’s canopy is framed with parametric trusses that transition from convex to concave, wrapped in translucent polycarbonate. It cantilevers 24 feet to create a protected porch where the community can gather outdoors, regardless of the weather. To either side of the canopy, service boxes contain restrooms, storage, and the community kitchen. Situating the new building on a slope between two groves of trees at the edge of the site maximizes the arable land in front of the building and minimizes the building profile for the neighbors. Beyond the Classroom Building, RBUFW’s site was designed to include substantial wetland restoration, permaculture, greenhouses, over 30,000 square feet of in-ground farming, and composting and cold storage facilities. An original garden shed was renovated to create space for administration, restrooms, and a conference room.

Rainier Beach Urban Farm and Wetlands is a vibrant community hub for food, urban farming, and environmental education in the heart of Rainier Beach-- one of the most diverse zip codes in the nation. The 7.2 acres site is ½ dedicated to organic food production and ½ restored natural wetlands. They offer a variety of community education classes and workshops including growing and preserving your food and conserving our environment, plus volunteer opportunities for individuals and groups year-round.

As a vibrant working farm and environmental center, it provides 20,000 pounds of fresh produce thru CSAs and a pay what you can farmstand. The Good Food Bags program links local farms to consumers. A youth employment program prepares young people for agriculture careers. Community meals feed thousands every year. Nearly half the site is a wetland that has been painstakingly restored, removing invasive species and replanting thousands of wetland trees and shrubs.

Cedar Cottage, originally designed for the Phelan family

Recently, Seattle put out a call for lower-cost designs to be ‘pre-approved’ for building permits. One of the biggest challenges for backyard cottages is the uncertainty and permitting difficulty for many people who may never have taken on a big project like this before. CAST answered the call, putting together four designs ranging in size and features, derived from our long experience with the backyard cottage market. Here is a preview of the four models, each has its own special hook—sloped lots, accessibility, expandability, or super small size:

Cloud Cottage, 481 sf footprint, multiple configurations from studio, or 2 story version with studio over garage, 1 bedroom or 2 bedroom.

Kestrel Cottage—one or optional two bedroom (not shown here), all on one level for accessibility and aging in place.

Crow’s Nest, original design for Matt and Amy Stevenson, adapted for Seattle’s Pre-Approved Cottage program

Over the next month, regardless of what this City does, CAST will be developing some or all of these designs and making them available for purchase with an agreement to use CAST for the site specific engineering, permitting and zoning work. If you are interested in finding out more, contact Matt@CASTarchitecture.com.

Matt will be at the Center for Architecture & Design from 9:00am - 12pm delivering an information-packed overview of the design and construction process including budget and schedule, tips for hiring the right team, and how you and your designer can work together to make the most of any project.

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Download it here: New Housing Options in Residential Small Lot (RSL) zone.

Residential Small Lot zoning will create new housing options in established urban village neighborhoods

Mandatory Housing Affordability passed City Council yesterday, and as part of that, about 7000 urban Single Family lots will now be able to have two or three primary residences (plus ADUs) on site. I’m pleased that we were able to suggest some amendments that will make the zone more workable, improve flexibility for sites where people would like to preserve the original house.

What is RSL?

In a nutshell:

1 primary residence per 2000 sq ft of lot (one ADU per primary residence allowed)

if your lot is smaller than 4000 sq ft, you could still do two residences.

Floor Area Ratio : .75

Lot coverage: 50%

Maximum size of any single primary residence: 2200sq ft.

Residential Small Lot Streetscape

While conceived as a kind of new ‘cottage’ zoning, it is better suited to compact 2 1/2 story urban houses.

We’ve come up with a prototypical design which maxes out all the limits, and it still feels pretty good within the existing streetscape. It is a 1500 sq ft upper unit, with main level suite, and open living/dining/kitchen (w/ twelve foot ceilings), two typical bedrooms and a second master on level two, with a patio/kitchen garden on the roof. In the basement (half below grade to avoid being counted toward F.A.R.) we’ve designed a 1 bedroom/1 bath Accessory Dwelling Unit, which could easily be integrated into the primary house, set up to generate revenue to help with the mortgage, or be co-owned like a two party condo association.

Because it is a relatively compact volume, with flexibility about solar orientation for a range of urban sites, hopefully we’ll get some owners interested in pursuing Passive House green building standards!

Residential Small Lot zoning: Courtyard bungalows

There is a real opportunity, once you start combining lots, to also aggregate the open space, and get back to that Courtyard Bungalow type that we used to build before zoning made them by and large illegal. Since parking isn’t going to be required for most, the market is going to dictate, but hopefully we’ll be spared a lot of impervious area creating more run off issues.

What is the RSL market and will any of it be affordable?

While I’m pretty excited about the eventual potential of this zone, there are very few neighborhoods where this is going to pencil (i.e. high priced, high demand markets).

1) it is happening where land values are going to be the highest (urban villages), but with the low density limits, land costs cannot be spread across more than 2 or 3 units for the most part—at minimum $300K of any newly developed unit is going to be for land value.

2) With low densities, it will be nearly impossible to provide new rent restricted housing on site. Nearly all development will pay the MHA fee (up to $45,650 per unit). With the ‘downzones’ to RSL that Council enacted with the late amendments taking many Lowrise areas a step back, it ensures than most of those areas will never see rent-restricted housing.

3) Similar to Vancouver’s market where the high cost of detached housing is tempered by ‘mortgage helpers’ like Laneway houses, ADUs are really the only new less expensive option, and that is purely because of the size of those units.

We are very excited to be involved in a fantastic affordable housing project in collaboration with the Methow Housing Trust.  We are going to to be rolling out two and three bedroom houses along Canyon Street in Twisp, perfect for workforce housing or elderly residents--two demographics that are often the first to lose out when demand for housing is running up prices.  

Congratulations to the whole Team and a huge thanks to Historic Seattle for the the recognition of the Robert Reichert House and Studio with the 2017 Outstanding Modern Preservation award last night!

Project team:

Clients : Reichert Studio
Heidi and Darin

Contractor: Dboone Construction
Dave Boone Project manager, Luke Marcum Site super

Architect : CAST architecture
Stefan Hampden, principal  & Brian Campbell, associate.

Structural Engineer: TSE Engineering
Keith Ryan PE

Envelope Engineer: RDH building Science inc
Dan Rundle

Historic Seattle - 2017 Outstanding Modern Preservation Award

Abridged project team at the awards left to right : Luke, Dave, Stefan, Darin, Heidi and Jeffrey 

Historic Seattle Dinner and awards ceremony at Washington Hall.

New stucco facade of the Reichert House & Studio complete with shadow paintings

Interior stairs with view of "door to heaven"

Retooled entry of completed project

We're almost done with a believe it or not historical renovation of a mid-century architect's own house--more to come! 

There is a certain ethereal, minimal quality to a room without walls, without columns, without visible support. 

At Rainier Beach, our classroom building has a 24' x 24' covered outdoor space, with a translucent roof components, cantilevering off the building. Last week, they put up the trusses and now the skeleton of the space is taking shape, and I'm pretty excited.  The Big Cantilever can be absolutely magic on a visceral level, where the structure's logic defies gravity.  

Now can you be begin to perceive the core of the design: heavy elements buttressed into a hillside, between two groves of trees, with a translucent wedge floating over a simple gathering space, out of the rain, with the farmland stretching out, uninterrupted.