The Portland Design Commission last week offered nearly unanimous praise during a design advice hearing for a full-block apartment building that would replace a former Sunshine Dairy facility in Northeast Portland. Criticism was fairly specific in scope and was limited to a few nuances.

The Dairy Apartments are being designed by Hacker Architects for developer Eastbank, an affiliate of owner NBP Capital, which acquired the site and adjacent properties earlier this year for $8.1 million. The building would contain six floors of apartments over one level of below-grade parking. The 244 apartments units would have floorplans ranging from studios to three bedrooms, and ten affordable units would be included in accordance with inclusionary housing requirements.

The building consists of two seemingly separate towers connected at the ground floor. Ground-level apartments will feature a raised stoop that separates balconies from the sidewalk.

“It’s really well thought out,” Commissioner Zari Santner said. “This is modern, but it is borrowing from the vocabulary of nature as well as some of the industrial past.”

Commissioners were united in at least one criticism, which concerned the ground-level stoop. As proposed, the balcony would sit over 5 feet above the sidewalk, which commissioners said would create an unpleasant pedestrian experience. Commissioner Jessica Molinar described the ground floor as feeling like a “fortress” and said she has seen similar stoops in the Pearl District which didn’t work well for pedestrians.

Commissioner Brian McCarter said the proposed 5-foot-6-inch height is too much, but said a height between 2 and 3 feet would be effective.

Chairwoman Julie Livingston was more pointed in her critique, bringing attention to a lack of canopies or cover on the building’s sides, which are needed to keep pedestrians dry. She emphasized that it’s important to shield not only residents and visitors, but also people that are simply walking by.

Her main focus was on the building’s similarity to another Hacker-designed project, the TwentyTwenty Condominiums, which are located less than a quarter mile north on 21^st Avenue.

“I think you need more generations in between the TwentyTwenty and this,” Livingston said. “This needs to be the 5.0 or the 6.0.”

With two similar buildings so close together, Livingston said she worried about setting a precedent for the neighborhood’s style.

While the old dairy building itself will be demolished to make way for the apartments, the design team plans to preserve an old telegraph building and antenna tower at the north end of the site, which it said has an iconic presence in Portland.

Located on Northeast 21^st Avenue, the Dairy Apartments are the latest addition to a spate of recent development near the Sandy Boulevard corridor. The site is expected to become part of a designated pedestrian district by the end of the year, and a future bus route is expected to run by the building, although funding has not yet been secured and those plans could be at least five years out.

The project will return before the commission for a design review hearing at a date yet to be set.

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