Smith Tower Tenant Improvement

Seattle, WA, United States

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Smith Tower Tenant Improvement

Seattle, WA, United States

Firm

Brownwork

Type

Commercial › Office Showroom

STATUS

Built

YEAR

2013

SIZE

25,000 sqft - 100,000 sqft

BUDGET

$1M - 5M

This project is a 33,000-square-foot interior tenant improvement on three consecutive floors in Seattle’s historic Smith Tower, designed in collaboration by Steve Brown of Brownwork LLC and Ian Butcher of Best Practice Architecture. The client is a footwear and apparel design company that was looking to accommodate executive offices, design staff, administrative staff, and private showrooms in which they can display their samples and entertain wholesale clients. All of the office/admin/design space was placed on floors 19 and 20. There, the aesthetic was clean and contemporary, with a client-requested “dark and light” theme. New partition walls and dropped ceilings were wrapped in colored pinup material to mimic the tissue lining of a shoebox and were respectfully separated from the building’s historic shell and interior corridors by planes of fixed clear glass. The showrooms were placed on the 21st floor and designed with a period-correct aesthetic in mind. In the women’s showroom, existing odd window patterns were enhanced with custom paneling and lighting layout, custom display fixtures were designed, vintage furniture was brought in, and a rescued 14-foot mahogany bar was brought up through the elevator shaft. In the men’s showroom, reclaimed barn lumber was used for wall coverings and display surfaces, and part of the tower’s original exterior façade was exposed and restored after years of being enclosed by a previous retrofit project.

The project budget was $1.35 million ($41 per square foot, including furniture) and the construction schedule was only 12 weeks. As the largest current tenant, this project is the crown jewel of Smith Tower’s two-year aggressive occupancy growth from 15 to 75 percent, on the eve of its historic centennial year.