In contrast to other buildings in developer Kevin Cavenaugh’s eye-catching portfolio, his next project may be unlikely to attract hundreds of Instagram followers.

The Portland Design Commission on Thursday approved, by a 6-1 vote, plans for Great Scott Trio – a four-story mixed-use building that Cavenaugh’s Guerrilla Development has proposed for a prominent lot on East Burnside Street.

Guerrilla Development has gained an outsize profile for singular buildings such as the colorful Fair-Haired Dumbbell and leafy Tree Farm office buildings in inner East Portland.

Great Scott Trio’s design is comparatively muted: There is no Seussian color palette or tree pods. Instead, the building would have blue-gray steel cladding and durable precast concrete for an arcade along Burnside Street. An interior courtyard would have warm wooden trim.

“I wanted it to be strong enough to stand on its own without me whispering in your ear what the major design moves are,” Cavenaugh said in an interview.

It is the building’s program that is more unusual: 37 small multifamily units – 12 of which would be intended for 18-year-old renters who have aged out of foster care. The 12 units will rent at rates below average: 60 percent of area median income, or approximately $920 a month. The market-rate apartments will rent for about $1,100 a month while offering a modest living space of approximately 390 square feet, Cavenaugh said.

The building will rise on a half-block at East Burnside Street and Seventh Avenue; the existing parking lot previously served Burnside Brewing Co., which closed in 2019, and later a pop-up for Mikkeller, a trendy Danish brewery. The single-story restaurant and warehouse building will remain and be renovated, Cavenaugh said. The developer said he has a “handshake agreement” with Kurt Huffman of ChefStable to open some type of restaurant or brewpub in time.

“That’s going to be a really good engine for the block,” Cavenaugh said.

The third leg of the Great Scott Trio is the space between the two buildings, Cavenaugh said. (Disclosure: The 91��Ƶ leases space at another Guerrilla Development building, the Fair-Haired Dumbbell.)

The design by Portland’s Convergence Architecture was based on Cavenaugh’s “napkin sketch” concept, but Convergence did the actual architectural work, he said. Design commissioners were largely complimentary of the split-level walk-up design that Cavenaugh said was in part a response to institutional multifamily developments.

“I’m disliking a lot of Portland’s big monolithic boxes, the five-over-ones, that have been dropping down from Phoenix or Dallas institutional money on our landscape,” he said.

The project changed substantially from an earlier iteration that drew some skepticism from the Design Commission, and proved to be too expensive for the affordable-housing mission, Cavenaugh said.

The building’s design was influenced by its neighbors, including the Orleans building at Eighth Avenue and Burnside Street. Like the Orleans, Great Scott Trio will have an arcade fronting Burnside. The new building will have three retail suites of approximately 650 square feet each on the Burnside arcade.

Design commissioners were largely complimentary.

“The project has really borrowed the industrial language and material prevalent in the district in a very clever way and a very modern way,” Commissioner Zari Santner said.

Commissioner Chandra Robinson cast the lone no vote. The proposal did not fit the neighborhood context, she said.

“Other buildings have greater level of detail,” she said.

Cavenaugh said he plans to apply for permits immediately, and begin construction later this year. He said he has a general contractor in mind but was not ready to publicly identify it.

Construction is expected to cost about $6 million, Cavenaugh said. The project’s backers are local investors, he added.

“They’re always individuals that I’ve had cups of coffee with,” he said. “There’s no outside money.”

Great Scott Trio is an opportunity zone project, offering capital-gains tax breaks that escalate until the property has been held for 10 years.

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Portland developer Kevin Cavenaugh has purchased the Oregon Theater, and he’s pledging to keep it intact.

Cavenaugh bought the 10,482-square-foot building, at 3530 S.E. Division St., from longtime owner Gayne Maizels for $1.8 million. It was the last remaining adult film theater in Portland, and for more than 40 years was known for sex acts on-screen – and in the audience.

The 94-year-old building has languished because of deferred maintenance. The property was listed for $2.1 million and was encumbered by liens prior to the sale. The purchase closed on Monday. Records show $16,799 in taxes was paid to Multnomah County on Wednesday.

Cavenaugh, owner of Guerrilla Development, said he’ll have the building cleaned thoroughly – he used a limited liability company named Double Scrub to complete the purchase – and will reopen it as another sort of theater.

“It’s the first building I’ve purchased where I’ll be pressure washing the inside more than the outside,” he said.

The building comprises a 6,000-square-foot theater, two 1,000-square-foot apartments with two bedrooms and a bathroom each, and two 1,000-square-foot retail spaces fronting Division Street.

On March 3, Willamette Week that the theater had shuttered.

Cavenaugh said his offer was one of more than 20 for the property, and not the highest dollar figure. Other bidders wanted to tear down the building, however, and Maizels preferred Cavenaugh’s plan to refurbish it.

Maizels was represented by City & State Real Estate, but the brokerage was not involved in the transaction. Ethos Commercial Advisors and Cavenaugh approached Maizels directly. Maizels could not be reached for comment.

Cavenaugh said he’ll keep the building’s structure and use as a theater – though not for the same kind of films.

“I can guarantee you that use will not continue,” he said. “I’m happily married with three children.”

Any significant changes would trigger a city requirement to reinforce the building with seismic bracing – something Cavenaugh is trying to avoid. A seismic retrofit would cost more than the building is worth, he said.

“It’s just going to get a whole hell of a lot of needed upgrades,” he said.

The building will receive a new heating and cooling system as well as accessibility improvements, and a fresh coat of paint, Cavenaugh said.

“All the sketchiness will go away, but all the flavor will remain – that’s the intent,” he said.

Cavenaugh does not have a theater operator lined up. The eventual operator will get naming rights, he said. The theater is relatively large, with about 400 fixed seats.

“I’m the idiot who bought a theater in the middle of a global pandemic,” he said. “It’s probably the dumbest thing I’ve done, and I’ve done a lot of dumb things.”

Still, Cavenaugh admitted there’s “some sadness” to the theater’s closure, and said he would find some way to memorialize its past.

“There’s part of me that laments this Portland that I moved to 30 years ago – this is another piece of it that’s going away,” he said.

The property is in the Richmond neighborhood, in a gentrified corridor of new apartment buildings, trendy eateries and retail boutiques.

Josh Bean said he and Brian Hanson of Ethos Commercial Advisors brought the Oregon Theater to Cavenaugh’s attention after learning it was for sale. The developer is perhaps best known for the Fair-Haired Dumbbell, a colorful mixed-use building near the east end of the Burnside Bridge. But he has also backed Tree Farm, The Zipper, The Ocean and numerous other projects.

“Kevin’s a visionary and was a logical fit for the project,” Bean said. “We were pleased we could broker the deal and provide a happy ending for both parties.”

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Portland’s commercial landlords are quietly working individually with tenants to reduce or delay lease payments during the coronavirus pandemic.

Landlords are prioritizing efforts to keep mom-and-pop tenants afloat while their doors are closed. On Monday, Gov. Kate Brown ordered most types of retail businesses to close. Even those businesses that are permitted to remain open – restaurants, for example, can provide to-go service – face a steep decline in revenue.

Guerrilla Development owner Kevin Cavenaugh wrote a letter to the company’s 32 restaurant and retail tenants forgiving April rent. The recipients of the March 17 note included operators of restaurants, bars and hair salons.

“It was a pretty easy decision,” Cavenaugh said.

Many of Guerrilla Development’s tenants are on leases of five, six or seven years.

“Guerrilla’s a long-term-hold company and a relationship company,” Cavenaugh said. “I care about you paying me rent a year from now, not two months from now.”

Beam Development is also working with its retail tenants who depend on a steady flow of foot traffic, including Water Avenue Coffee, Bunk Sandwiches, Danwei Canting and others. Beam relies heavily on local businesses that rent relatively small spaces.

“We’re sensitive to the health and survival of our tenants,” said Brad Malsin, Beam’s founder and principal. “We’re going to arrive shortly at a relief package for them.”

Other commercial landlords are taking similar steps, hoping to act as a buffer to ensure tenants can endure the shutdown. In doing so, landlords said they’re acting both out of selfless virtue and selfish business interests. Without tenants, landlords don’t make money. And in a sudden, precipitous economic decline, it may be more prudent to ride out the crisis with existing tenants rather than evict nonpaying ones as they might in more normal times – particularly with demand from prospective tenants likely to be next to nonexistent for weeks or months to come.

“It’s the right thing to be doing to give tenants relief, whether it’s commercial or residential,” said Paul Del Vecchio, founding principal of Ethos Development. “We’re going to be the buffer, and we’re prepared to be. We’ve proactively cut rent and told our businesses to pay their employees first. We want them to come out the other side.”

Ethos owns the Barley Pod food-cart pod on Northeast Halsey Street and other commercial spaces. Ethos has cut rent for April, and will address May when it comes closer, Del Vecchio said.

“We’re working with people,” he said. “There’s not a lot of slack in the economy, even when it was running well. So it doesn’t take much (to disrupt it).”

Del Vecchio and Josh Bean, an Ethos principal, went to their investors to discuss cutting rent for retail tenants. They didn’t hesitate.

“We reached out to our investors and all talked about it, and we decided it was better to lean into this proactively,” Del Vecchio said.

Some building owners are providing relief for tenants but did not want to be identified, fearing backlash from lenders, investors or less-vulnerable tenants who are not getting a break. A large-scale Portland landlord, who was not willing to be identified, said he is cutting rent in half for his mom-and-pop commercial tenants for the next three months, then amortizing the rent on the back end with no interest. He still expects corporate tenants to pay their usual rent.

Retail tenants are first in line for help. Office tenants often are locked into longer leases and are typically less vulnerable to a short-term downturn.

Brown’s  is discussing a potential moratorium on commercial evictions due to inability to pay. State agencies including Oregon Housing and Community Services and the Department of Consumer and Business Services are also pursuing relief options, according to the governor’s office.

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In the future, perhaps the 2020s will be remembered as the decade Portland’s urban buildings increasingly went green.

Not just green as in low carbon, high performance and high efficiency. Green as in leaves, vines and branches.

Tree Farm is the unmissable example. The six-story office and retail building at the Morrison Bridge‘s east landing has dozens of strawberry trees in massive planters attached to the exterior on all four sides.

“From a traditional real estate pro-forma sense, it doesn’t make sense to put trees on the outside of the building,” said David Davies, who leads Alta Urban Projects and served as Tree Farm’s co-developer alongside Kevin Cavenaugh’s Guerrilla Development. “But we knew we wanted to do something unique to bring beauty to the Central Eastside, where it’s a built environment with warehouses.”

By bringing nature to the urban fabric, Davies said, the greenery sets the building apart.

“It stands out,” he said.

Final touches are being added to Tree Farm, with tenants expected to move in within days, Davies said.

Following in the development pipeline is the leafy proposed design for the Westwind Apartments, a publicly subsidized affordable housing project in Old Town Chinatown. The design, currently being evaluated by the Portland Design Commission and Bureau of Development Services, calls for plantings at each floor climbing the building’s corner.

The greenery is designed to integrate into each level, providing residents a view with an organic element.

“No matter what level they’re on, as they look out, in the foreground of their view of the context there’s a little garden space,” said Brian Cavanaugh, principal and co-founder of Architecture Building Culture, which is designing the project for Central City Concern in collaboration with Works Progress Architecture.

“It’s sort of an exploration of biophilia and trying to bring greenery into the experience of the residents,” he said.

It’s not an entirely novel idea to put trees and other plants on building exteriors. Downtown Portland’s PacWest Center, a 1980s concrete-and-steel tower, has sported an evergreen tree on its mid-building terrace for decades. More recently, Mirabella, a South Waterfront residential tower, arrived with extensive landscaping stepping up the building.

In Seattle, The Spheres, occupied by Amazon, delivered a prime example of a sort of office greenhouse. Internationally, newer buildings in major cities have gone vegetal, like Milan’s Bosco Verticale (Vertical Forest), a two-tower residential development built in 2014 with hundreds of trees and other plants. A regional government in China is constructing an entire Forest City of buildings that incorporate trees.

Locally, the greening of urban buildings has been spurred by environmental consciousness, advances in landscape architecture and the city of Portland’s eco-roofs requirement. Since summer 2018, new buildings of 20,000 net square feet or larger within certain Central City zones are required to have eco-roofs.

The roofs are meant to process carbon and alleviate the urban heat island effect. The accumulation of new eco-roofs may significantly change the look and feel of downtown Portland in time. Whereas aerial shots of downtown Portland from the mid-20th century show vast expanses of surface parking lots, by the middle of the 21st century, the same views could look much greener.

“Green roofs are definitely here to stay,” said Carol Mayer-Reed, principal at landscape architect Mayer/Reed Inc.

Reed distinguished between green roofs, which are intensively planted and have deep soil depths, from eco-roofs, which can be small, shallow sections atop a building. Green roofs have come a long way from years ago, when it was difficult to find an insurance carrier to cover landscape architects working on them, Mayer-Reed said.

Mayer/Reed Inc. designed landscaped planters incorporated into the face of the parking garage at Portland International Airport. The greenery arose from conversations with the Port of Portland board, which wanted a natural look after obscuring a view of Mount Hood, Mayer-Reed said.

Port officials and landscape architects settled on a design for extensively landscaped planters. “The Port board were willing to look at a landscaped statement that expressed how lush and beautiful our Pacific Northwest is,” Mayer-Reed said. “That’s been in for years and it’s maintained really well.”

Natural elements, done well, can enhance a built design.

“It can be quite effective and it can be beautiful and it can express seasonality,” Mayer-Reed said.

Maintenance is the looming question for extensively landscaped projects, as some members of the Portland Design Commission have pointed out in recent hearings.

“It’s an attempt to distinguish architecture and gain attention, and I do think the maintenance that’s given to those will define how long they last,” Mayer-Reed said.

In the case of Tree Farm, the project team brought in strawberry trees – Arbutus unedo, a hardy evergreen – from Cistus Nursery on Sauvie Island.

“We needed something that would work on all four faces with different solar exposure,” said Westin Glass, development manager at Guerrilla Development.

The strawberry trees are not expected to grow much larger, keeping maintenance needs to a minimum.

“One thing we focused on was durability and low maintenance,” Davies said. “They’re not going to be enormous trees.”

Each planter has its own individually controlled irrigation as well as a fire sprinkler – something city officials requested when the project was evaluated while the Eagle Creek Fire raged.

The trees will likely be maintained by a winched cart system similar to those used by window washers, Glass said. It remains to be seen if Guerrilla Development’s in-house maintenance team will maintain the plants, or whether the ownership will hire an outside contractor.

The initial reception to the project has been strong, the developers said. Prospective office tenants have expressed interest, and the ground floor is filling up. Nicholas Restaurant will soon open a location in the building, and the building owners are in discussions with coffee-shop operators. A speakeasy-style bar is a possibility for another ground-floor space.

The trees and related systems added a “few hundred thousand dollars” to the approximately $10 million construction cost of Tree Farm, Davies said. The building is otherwise simple – an intentional strategy to keep costs down and allow for competitive lease rates. Yet the trees add interest to an otherwise typical commercial building.

“It tends to soften buildings and brings interest and nature into the landscape where, at Tree Farm, tenants will be able to look out and see nice, beautiful trees,” Davies said. “And they’ll have nice views of downtown and the river.”

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Developer Kevin Cavenaugh’s latest brainstorm – a proposal for a 14-unit residential project in the Nob Hill neighborhood – got a hearty go-ahead from Portland’s Historic Landmarks Commission on Monday.

DAO Architecture designed the Unicorn Bed Apartments, two three-story buildings, for Cavenaugh’s Guerrilla Development. The complex will occupy a 5,000-square-foot lot at 2171 N.W. Glisan St., and drawings suggest it will strongly resemble the type of wood-clad walk-up commonly found a century ago.

“I like the simplicity of the design and I like the more modern interpretation of a historic design, including the iron railings,” Commissioner Matthew Roman said just prior to the unanimous vote to approve the proposal. “It’s putting a modern building together that still has the warmth and human scale; it just feels like it’s not just a machine-made monster unpacked from someplace else.”

An existing triplex is set back from the street on the lot, with a small surface parking lot in front. The building will be demolished to make way for the new development, which will feature 13 two-bedroom units approximately 600 square feet each. The 14th unit is intended to provide residents with a day care space, but it could be converted into another residence.

At least one of the ground-floor apartments will be fully accessible for persons with disabilities as required by the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Exterior materials will include a concrete foundation, wood lap siding, aluminum-clad windows, standing-seam metal roofing, and ornate, laser-cut metal railings.

Commissioners approved requested modifications to building height, side setbacks, landscaped areas and pedestrian path width.

The proposal calls for bicycle storage in the building’s basement, but no motor vehicle parking.

The building is geared to serve single mothers with young children, and the on-site day care space is intended to attract such tenants. The plan is for rents to be “affordable.”

“Existing zoning would allow a much larger structure here, but our client and landowner have prioritized a different direction to fit a special population of tenants,” DAO Architecture principal David Horsley said. “We believe it’s this program and the architectural features of the project that have garnered such positive feedback from the neighborhood association.”

Guerrilla Development has gained much attention for its colorful, bold projects such as the Fair-Haired Dumbbell and Tree Farm. But the Unicorn Bed Apartments, at a glance, does not follow suit. The neutral color palette, siding and metal railings all hark back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when multifamily buildings came in many more shapes and sizes than typically are found in Portland now. The surrounding neighborhood features a mix of historic single-family and multifamily structures.

“We wanted to create a modest, welcoming, dignified project for families that blends into the neighborhood context,” DAO Architecture principal Joanne Le said.

The commission did not spend a long time deliberating. Instead, the jovial discussion ended up in laughter.

“It fits in so well,” Commissioner Derek Spears said. “I can see that the building in that spot fits in perfectly. One thing, and humor me here, but I don’t see any unicorns on the side though.”

Roman quickly answered.

“Some,” he said with a chuckle, “argue affordable housing in a historic district is a unicorn.”

But maybe not.

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It hasn’t been an entirely smooth process, with several delays holding up installation of Tree Farm‘s signature elements. But the 54 steel tree planters that give Guerrilla Development‘s latest mixed-use project its name have finally been put into place.

A crew of ironworkers from Cascade Erectors completed that task recently when it installed the remaining planters on the building’s north and west sides. The six-story, 41,000-square-foot creative office building now stands out – especially with a bold, flowery exterior hand-painted by design consultant Jeanne Mare Werle.

General contractor Pro-Teck Construction is in charge of the Brett Schulz Architect-designed project on Southeast Third Avenue, near the westbound side of the Morrison Bridge’s.

Designers worked with WDY Inc. to create what architect Ben Carr called an “exoskeleton of tube steel” to bear the weight of the planters, which each weigh over a metric ton. This exoskeleton, however, is designed so it bears only the planters’ weight and not the weight of the surrounding building. Those plates then support the steel planters in their entirety.

The remainder of the building is being constructed with a standard slab-on-grade foundation supporting six stories of wood framing. The building is designed as a cube, providing visual symmetry from both near and far.

Crews now are wrapping up window installation and other rough-in tasks. On the interior, drywall installers are finishing their work ahead of painting and other finishes. Delivery was initially scheduled for this fall, but now won’t occur until sometime in 2020.

The post Strawberry trees arriving at unusual destination appeared first on Daily Journal of Commerce.

Portland developer Kevin Cavenaugh has a knack for capturing attention with eye-catching projects. His firm’s latest is certainly no exception.

With 54 steel tree planters embedded in the sides of a six-story, 41,000-square-foot building, Guerrilla Development‘s Tree Farm, at Southeast Third Avenue and Morrison Street in Portland, is aptly named. It follows the firm’s colorful Fair-Haired Dumbbell near the east end of the Burnside Bridge.

“Kevin literally did a napkin sketch of this idea, which was a six-story building with essentially a cube in massing,” said Ben Carr, project architect for Brett Schulz Architect PC. “And he handed it to me and said, ‘Let’s figure this out and get it done.’”

From that initial drawing, the concept of a building adorned with living trees quickly came to life. Now general contractor Pro Teck Construction is building Tree Farm on a quarter-block parcel. It’s a constricted site, with only a few feet separating the new building from adjacent structures and the Morrison Bridge. This ruled out use of a tower crane, Pro Teck superintendent Michael Griffy said.

“It’s a great design, but it’s been a challenge, and it’s a unique challenge,” he said. “I would really like to be able to put a crane on the Morrison Bridge and stock the sixth floor from there.”

The project is noteworthy in a number of ways, beginning with the work done below grade. There, deep soil mixing was employed to compensate for the soft fill soil found near the banks of the Willamette River. Columns 45 feet deep were placed in a grid pattern underneath the foundation. These are separate from bearing piles and are intended to stabilize the soil rather than the building itself.

“It’s basically a concrete slurry to stabilize the soil to prevent liquefaction in case of an earthquake,” Carr said.

However, the biggest challenge was creating a design for load-bearing exterior walls. Architects worked with WDY Structural & Civil Engineers to devise a solution involving what Carr describes as a “sort of exoskeleton of tube steel.”

“The first thing they told me is you’re taking all of this weight, and each of those tree planters is going to weigh between (2,000 and) 3,000 pounds,” Carr said. “And you’re putting all that weight on the outside of the building, which is a terrible seismic idea.”

This exoskeleton, however, is designed so that it does not bear the weight of the surrounding wood-framed building itself. Instead, it will only support a series of steel knife plates welded into the columns. Those plates will then be the mounts upon which the steel planters will be placed.

“It’s essentially a separate column,” Carr said. “The tube steel carries the weight of the trees back into the building.”

And because structural steel is already in place for the exterior walls, it was no stretch to include steel load-bearing columns on the first four stories. Exposed wood columns are featured on the top two floors, and glu-lam beams throughout so that a woodsy aesthetic is evident inside and out.

Cross-laminated timber panels were considered, Carr added, but rejected on cost and logistical grounds.

The building itself has a slab-on-grade foundation and five stories of wood framing. It will hold office space above ground-floor retail space.

One more challenge was ensuring the strawberry trees destined for the planters will receive enough water. Rainfall alone is not enough to support the small, evergreen trees, which are native to Western Europe and the Mediterranean region. So, designers worked with Cistus Nursery to devise a network of irrigation piping to be built into the wood-framed walls and plumbed to provide water to each individual planter.

Each of the building’s four exposures is controlled by separate valves. Each story is similarly controlled, all the way down to individual planters, which will have separate irrigation lines attached to a moisture sensor to measure the amount of water received from all sources.

“We even have the ability to fertilize and water each tree remotely without actually getting up on the building,” Carr said.

Crews have nearly roughed in the building. Drywall is being installed drywall throughout. MEP contractors, meanwhile, are busy building mechanical systems. Project delivery is scheduled for this fall.

Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to reflect both the correct number of tree planters on the building and the anticipated time of project delivery.

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A Portland startup is aiming to turn commercial real estate into the next field for crowdfunding investment.

BuildingBits allows customers to invest as little as $1,000 in a commercial building. The company evaluates and selects individual buildings to present to investors to purchase. Investors can then purchase a share. Once a fundraising goal equal to the purchase price is reached, a property passes into escrow.

BuildingBits’ platform is registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. BuildingBits received SEC approval in September, and founder Alex Aginsky is now moving quickly to launch the business.

“That was a very long, complicated, arduous and expensive process,” Aginsky said of SEC registration.

Investors purchase a share of a limited liability company that will own a particular building. The LLC is formed at the time of closing.

The idea of using multiple small investors to build or purchase real estate is not unprecedented. The closest local comparison may be Kevin Cavenaugh’s Guerrilla Development, which used a crowdfunding model to back development of the Fair-Haired Dumbbell building.

Aginsky said his model has some similarities to Cavenaugh’s, with a few key differences. Cavenaugh’s investments were limited to Oregon residents, while Aginsky is casting a wider net. And Aginsky is looking to replicate the crowdfunding model repeatedly.

Aginsky’s pitch is that many small-scale investors such as schoolteachers could come up with $1,000 to invest in a building.

“This is an opportunity for them to dip their toe in the water and try this out and to receive regularly occurring dividends,” he said.

BuildingBits has 12 employees, and headquarters in the Pearl District. Aginsky said he conducted a successful round of fundraising in late 2016 and is embarking on another round now. Aginsky said he was heading to Silicon Valley shortly for a series of meetings with potential funders.

Aginsky said he plans to launch a trading platform next year where investors could buy or sell the building shares.

“In theory, we envision someone could buy a share of the Walgreens down the street and trade and sell those whenever they want,” he said.

Users can essentially create their own real estate investment trusts by focusing on a particular area of interest in the market, he said.

Aginsky previously founded Aginsky Capital Group, a boutique property investment firm for wealthy investors outside the U.S.

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Guerrilla Development‘s Fair-Haired Dumbbell has begun to attract a mix of hip retail shops and creative agencies drawn to the two colorful, connected buildings that were constructed in 2017.

Fifty percent of the 56,000 square feet of speculative office space is leased, Kevin Cavenaugh, principal of Guerrilla Development, stated in an email message.

The buildings opened for leasing amid strong competition in the Portland office market, and in particular the Central Eastside submarket, where developers are rushing to deliver projects.

Plastic Sunshine, a creative agency that offers brand, digital and activation services, has taken 2,000 square feet on the sixth floor of the north building.

TenPod, a co-working company, is taking the second floor of both buildings and will open in early June, Cavenaugh said. Fuzzco, another branding agency, also is an office tenant.

On the ground floor, Crema Coffee plans to open soon. And 11:11, a new retailer of modern office furnishings, is also working toward opening.

The sixth floor of the south building and the fourth floor of both buildings are taken by tenants that Cavenaugh could not yet disclose.

The Fair-Haired Dumbbell has attracted outsized attention in part due to the exterior mural of vibrant, abstract paint designed by Los Angeles artist James Jean. Cavenaugh also became the first developer in Oregon to use an innovative crowdfunding model to attract small investors.

Several of the office spaces are being built out to suit tenants.

“While the Dumbbell looks slow and empty now, we have crews in there building out the office spaces as fast as we can,” Cavenaugh stated. “Tenants are ready and I’m trying to keep up.”

Plastic Sunshine moved into its space in January after searching for something suitable in a newly constructed building, said Danica Wilson, co-founder of the agency. Most of the available office space in Portland was arriving via adaptive reuse, she said.

“Everything looked like it was in the old, dark, converted warehouse-y buildings,” she said.

Wilson was attracted to the lighter, modern look of the Fair-Haired Dumbbell.

“For us, the building looked really odd from the outside, but from the inside the building is beautiful and full of light, which is key to our creative inspiration,” she said.

The Fair-Haired Dumbbell’s seismic resiliency was another strong selling point, Wilson said.

The building has no vehicle parking. Wilson said that hasn’t been an issue because of street parking existing nearby, employees commuting by bicycle and easy access from the Portland Streetcar.

11:11 started with a successful pop-up at The Cleaners – the Ace Hotel‘s rentable space. Plans call for the new store at the Fair-Haired Dumbbell to softly open May 31, with a grand opening June 21.

Paloma Medina, the store’s proprietor, said she looked for seven or eight months before finding the right spot for 11:11 in the Fair-Haired Dumbbell. She drove by the building several times and grew to enjoy the colorful exterior.

“I really wanted to hate the building, but I kind of love it,” she said.

The building was built by Andersen Construction, with a design by FFA Architecture and Interiors.

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Key Development‘s follow-up to Yard will have little in common with the controversial Burnside bridgehead tower.

Instead of an imposing building envelope and black exterior panels, Yard‘s sibling will be much smaller and feature warm, reddish-brown bricks.

“We’re trying to make it more of a classic Central Eastside building than a striking, contemporary project, which we’ve kind of already done with Yard,” said Claudia Munk-von Flotow, chief operating officer of Key Development, the developer of Yard and the new project on Block 76 West. “It’s really not the little sister to Yard as we once concepted it to be.”

The mixed-use project was known in planning as SideYard – a play on it being a smaller neighbor to the 21-story project built first. Now that Yard has sold to an institutional buyer – the largely residential building was snapped up by a Thailand-based investor for $126.68 million in December 2016 – the SideYard name no longer made sense, Flotow said.

The Block 76 West building will rise to five stories and include 23,569 square feet. It’s being designed by Skylab Architecture, which also designed Yard. Andersen Construction, which previously built Yard and Guerrilla Development‘s Fair-Haired Dumbbell nearby, recently broke ground on the new project.

The program for Key’s building at 365 N.E. Couch St. hasn’t been finalized, but it’s likely to be two floors of retail space and three floors of office space, Flotow said. The retail spaces will likely face Northeast Couch Street and Third Avenue.

No vehicle parking will be provided. However, the development will include bicycle-friendly features such as “rolling curbs.”

Key Development, based in Hood River, has a lead on a potential ground-floor tenant: Ferment, a brewery that is opening a production facility and small taproom in Hood River. The company may be interested in a Portland location, Flotow said. Ferment is led by Dan Peterson, a former head brewer at Hood River brewery pFriem.

Block 76 West’s structure will set it apart: Key opted to use cross-laminated timber. The structure will be a CLT diaphragm with brick cladding. The CLT materials will be provided by D.R. Johnson, a timber manufacturer based in Riddle.

“We have done lots of conventionally framed, heavy-timber buildings,” Flotow said. “We’ve never done a CLT project. For us it’s both an aesthetic thing and time efficiency, especially with such a heavy building push and a labor market that’s not super available to do heavy-timber construction projects.”

Using CLT materials with precut holes and connections accelerates the building schedule, Flotow said.

“It makes for a really efficient construction process,” Flotow said. “You can just fly your structure a lot quicker.”

Flotow said she is not concerned by the recent delamination of CLT subflooring during construction of a building at Oregon State University in Corvallis. CLT is a proven technology with an established safety record in Europe and Canada, she said.

“There’s piles of literature of test results from both a structural and a fire-protection point of view that is giving us some confidence,” she said. “I don’t think we’re putting ourselves at a huge risk by going for a CLT diaphragm.”

Andersen Construction even sent a manager to Germany to learn about CLT, Flotow said. Andersen’s experience building in the cramped Burnside bridgehead area factored into its selection as general contractor, she said.

“They have efficient ways of staging and scheduling to stay on schedule and on budget,” she said.

The building is on track to open in spring 2019.

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