Design commissioners on Thursday suggested significant changes to a developer’s proposal for a mass-timber multifamily project near Forest Park in Northwest Portland.

Noel Johnson, an independent local developer, is proposing to build 13 structures containing 219 total multifamily units at Northwest 29th Avenue and Nicolai Street. Each building would have 16 to 19 units.

The development, known as Northbound 30 Collaborative, would be a companion to Johnson’s adjacent Wilson Forest Park Townhomes; construction of its final units is nearly complete. Both developments feature low-slung residences made from cross-laminated timber, but they have distinct investors and are separate legal entities.

Eight of the Northbound 30 (NB30) buildings were previously approved, with designs by Waechter Architecture and Jones Architecture. On Thursday, Johnson sought design advice for five additional buildings designed by Leeb Architects. The site gained room for more buildings after the Northwest Children’s Theater and School found a downtown location that better suited the organization’s needs, Johnson said.

The Design Commission awarded the previous design for NB30 a citation for design excellence. The newly proposed buildings still need some work, commissioners said Thursday.

“I don’t think the design of the new buildings fits in with the design of the previous buildings,” Commissioner Jessica Molinar said. “I think it’s just too many moves.”

Commissioner Don Vallaster agreed.

“This thing doesn’t work for me,” he said. “This thing has to be simplified. … It’s too dense, it’s confusing and it muddles the whole concept.”

The site has a base 3:1 floor-area ratio, and a height limit of 65 feet. Materials were chosen to echo Forest Park and the industrial sanctuary to the north, Johnson said.

Commissioners criticized a pedestrian walkway that they said leads to little except a leasing office and interacts too much with vehicle traffic. They also criticized a column holding up one of the building corners.

NB30 Collaborative would furnish 98 vehicle parking spaces, including 12 surface spots. Bicycle parking would total 345 spaces, including 219 in-unit spots.

There was some disagreement Thursday about whether the development met bike parking requirements when calculated separately with the five newest buildings, or overall. There are also limits to how many bike parking spaces can be provided in units, and even how far from the door they can be, Bureau of Development Services planner Grace Jeffreys said.

“We believe we fully meet code,” Johnson said.

Johnson told commissioners he and Leeb Architects would work to address their concerns.

“You’ve given us a lot of changes that we can incorporate to show respect for your opinions,” he said. “We will go back and attempt to do so.”

Most of the suggested changes were minor and could be accomplished, Johnson said.

“I thought this was a pretty purely design-driven discussion, and that’s something I respect,” he said.

The massing scheme of separate buildings means the project is not subject to inclusionary housing requirements, which apply only to buildings of 20 units or more. Johnson, who has criticized the affordable housing policy, said the site lent itself to the broken-up massing.

“It’s the right massing for the neighborhood to have multiple small buildings,” he said. “It’s just the right design response.

“Separate from that – I don’t think our inclusionary housing program is working.”

The NB30 Collaborative project team is scheduled to return before the Design Commission on June 2.

Johnson said he expects to use I&E Construction as general contractor. The Wilsonville firm built the Wilson Forest Park Townhomes.

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In the Portland-metro area, housing developments are continuing to rise. One that is advancing in Gresham’s Rockwood neighborhood may not look much like others when it’s finished.

General contractor LMC Construction is building Rockwood 10 – a six-building, 224-unit complex – slightly north of Southeast Yamhill Street at 186th Avenue. The project is being developed by Community Development Partners, a certified B Corporation with a Portland office on Northeast Alberta Street. Hacienda CDC is a co-developer and co-general partner. Waechter Architecture provided the design.

Low-income housing tax credits are being used for the project, so a portion of the apartments will be affordable housing units.

“It’s always been envisioned as an affordable housing project,” said Jessica Woodruff, CDP’s director of development for Oregon. “But we were always looking for ways to provide community benefit.”

Those benefits are twofold. First, Rockwood 10 will provide a highly diverse collection of units: 14 four-bedroom, 89 three-bedroom, 74 two-bedroom and 47 one-bedroom apartments – a mix virtually unheard of in today’s market. The residential buildings also will be unusual in that the ground-floor units will feature front entrances, rather than typical loaded corridors.

“This was really envisioned as family housing, so there are lots of larger units,” said Wendy Klein, CDP’s development manager for Oregon.

Second, the entire development will wrap around a large central park area and community building. The park will provide amenities ranging from play structures for kids to a large field suitable for sports. The community building, meanwhile, will feature a kitchen and an area for food carts. The structure will be used for events, classes and even small conferences. An existing grove of evergreen trees on the 7.4-acre site will remain and become host to a picnic area and walking paths.

A new stretch of Southeast 186th Avenue, meanwhile, will bisect the site north to south and create easy access between Yamhill and Stark streets. The park area will be open to the public and accessible not only from the new street, but also from apartment complexes to the east and the Knova Learning public charter school to the west.

“It’s really opening up that street to invite the public in,” Klein said.

LMC Construction Superintendent Reed Ledbetter noted the development will have a sustainable stormwater system.

“All site water is trapped and reintroduced (to) the site,” he said. “Drainage for the parking areas is done with a PaveDrain system that will basically take all the surface water from the paved areas and let them into a permeable paver system, and then there is basically a drywell system underneath.”

The new street, he added, will feature a series of vegetated drainage areas that direct street runoff into a series of drywells.

“Basically this has a net-zero impact to the existing storm infrastructure,” Ledbetter said. “It is purely just reintroduction to the soil.”

The project team also is focusing on hiring minority-owned, woman-owned and disadvantaged subcontractors as well as many east Multnomah County firms, said Richard Reese, LMC Construction vice president of construction.

“We have quite a few of these subcontractors who are local to the Gresham area,” he said.

Major subcontractors include: Time Frame Construction, Jet Electrical, Jet Mechanical, Jet Fire, Atlas Plumbing, LaRusso Concrete, Van Lom Concrete, Gresham Roofing, KO Contracting and Westside Drywall.

Rockwood 10 also will have public art throughout, Klein said. CDP has issued a request for proposals from parties interested in handling some of the remaining installations. Overall, the art will include a bright orange structural post, murals, custom light fixtures, metal sculptures and even custom fabrics for the furniture in the community building and other parts of the complex.

“We are actually on the search for local artists to do it,” Klein sad. “There are a host of opportunities for art that we’re trying to solicit artists for.”

Rockwood 10 is poised to become one of the most unique housing complexes of its type in the metro area.

“In my development experience, you often are trying to develop toward something, so this one is very interesting,” Woodruff said. “It’s more looking inward, but we’re excited to have a development that looks and feels different.”

The first of the five residential buildings is scheduled for completion in April 2021, with the remainder set to open in intervals ranging from one to two months thereafter.

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Ben Waechter, principal architect of Waechter Architecture, has long been attracted to cross-laminated timber. Soon it will dominate his firm’s new headquarters in North Portland.

The new three-story, mixed-use building will feature CLT throughout – not only as floors and stairs, but even as shear walls.

“The one thing that we wanted to do with this was to build a CLT or mass-timber building completely out of the material,” Waechter said. “This will be the first 100 percent CLT project in Oregon to use structural wall panels using prescriptive code.”

Ground was broken recently on the 10,000-square-foot building at 4224 N. Mississippi Ave., in a trendy commercial area surrounded by shops, a Prost! pub and a food-cart pod. Waechter Architecture, a 12-architect practice, will occupy the bottom two floors. Waechter himself will live in a third-floor residence (he currently lives above the firm’s leased office on North Williams Avenue).

The project has been more than a decade in planning. Waechter’s family has owned the vacant property for years.

“We’ve been thinking about this project for a long time,” he said. “The land has been sitting there.”

KPFF is lending structural expertise to the project. Anne Monnier, a KPFF principal, said she has worked on several CLT projects, but never one with mass-timber shear walls.

“That’s exciting about this project,” she said. “It brings the CLT conversation to the next level.”

The most challenging aspect is tying the CLT structure into the foundation, Waechter said. “That’s technically and aesthetically a challenge,” he said. “In a seismic event, it transfers enormous forces to the foundation.”

The project has attracted close attention from regulators as the first building to submit to the city’s prescriptive code for CLT structures. The Bureau of Development Services at one point requested further structural analysis.

“We always look at what’s the weakest link in the building,” Monnier said.

BDS officials wanted assurance that the joints would not pop, leading to a structural failure in a strong earthquake.

Iain Macdonald, executive director of the TallWood Design Institute – a collaboration between Oregon State University and the University of Oregon – said the prescriptive process offers a “speedier pathway” to local approval.

“The more that can fall within the prescriptive process, the better,” he said.

Waechter considered a range of materials for the building. He looked into structural brick, insulated concrete mixtures and autoclave concrete blocks. But Portland’s status as a showcase for CLT technology in the United States proved attractive.

“In the last couple of years, mass-timber knowledge being developed in the Northwest, it seemed like potentially the best solution,” he said.

Waechter opted to rely on KLH Massivholz GmbH, an Austrian manufacturer, to supply the CLT for the $3 million project.

“KLH was able to provide the highest level of quality for the lowest price,” he said.

Architecturally, part of the challenge was determining how to avoid covering the CLT.

“What we aspire to is designing buildings that have strong clarity and are fully integrated where material and space and mechanical systems are interwoven and become one office,” Waechter said.

The building will use hydronic heating and cooling – tubes filled with water that run in a 4-inch concrete slab on the ground. For additional cooling, fan coils will blow water-cooled air.

“We’re not using any refrigerants at all,” Waechter said.

The building will also be fully electric (no natural gas). No environmental certifications are being pursued for the project.

Tall windows will grace the front of the building in a simple grid. There will be no front door: Visitors will enter a passageway from North Mississippi Avenue that will lead to an outdoor courtyard surrounded on three sides by the U-shaped building, and on the south side by the cast concrete wall of the neighboring building, Mississippi Lofts.

From there, visitors will be able to enter ground-floor offices and workshops.

The building is designed for maximum flexibility. CLT buildings can be difficult to retrofit, so Waechter sought to make a future retrofit unnecessary. Each floor will be roughed in so that it can function as an office space or apartment. Demising walls could be installed without the need to redo sprinklers and electrical systems. Kitchens could be added.

“In the future, the bottom floor could become retail, the second floor could become office and the third floor could be residential,” Waechter said. “It could be all apartments. Technically, it’s been a little bit of a puzzle, but we’ve achieved it.”

Waechter said the building is designed to accommodate changing economic realities.

“All of the infrastructure is there for these different programs to plug and play,” he said. “So in that way we’re future-proofing it.”

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Portland developer Cairn Pacific is moving forward with plans to construct eight small multifamily buildings near Forest Park in Northwest Portland.

The Northbound Collective development would feature cutting-edge architecture and building materials in a unique checkerboard site plan to maximize open space and corner units.

The buildings would be constructed of mass timber – either cross-laminated timber or mass-plywood panels – and range from 15 to 19 units. In total, the development would have approximately 144 units.

The concept is for something better than a typical apartment box, Cairn Pacific principal Noel Johnson said.

“In a post-COVID world, people will value their home even more,” he said.

The proposed development is part of a roughly 3-acre group of properties Cairn Pacific has collected in the area of Northwest 29th Avenue and Roosevelt Street. Nearby, the firm is proposing to build 14 East Coast-style attached row houses. Those are being designed by local architect Richard Potestio.

For Northbound Collective, Johnson invited Waechter Architecture and Jones Architecture to split the design task. Each firm is designing four of the buildings. Each building is unique – similar to, but not quite like any other.

Johnson described the idea as “variations on a theme,” as in classical music.

Each lot in the checkerboard layout will have no-build easement to create implied property lines and space for window openings on adjacent buildings.

“What’s cool is that the combination of a scheme we worked on jointly – and then we each went our own direction in architecture – has resulted in something that’s much richer than we would have come up with collaboratively,” said – Alan Jones, principal at Jones Architecture.

About 70 percent of the units will sit on building corners, far more than in a typical apartment building, providing more natural light and views.

“We’re able to put window openings on that property line façade,” said Ben Waechter, principal of Waechter Architecture. “Even though these are zero-lot-line buildings, we’re essentially able to put windows on all four sides on all of our buildings.”

The buildings will be different than most. The Waechter-designed structures are arranged in a donut shape, with a central landing or atrium on each floor. That enables the apartments to have no hallways.

Johnson, who previously lived next to the site for about 10 years, said he’s eager to provide housing in a growing neighborhood near Forest Park and employment centers such as Montgomery Park.

“I’ve been trying to figure out how to make this totally underutilized area into something cool since about 2004,” Johnson said.

It’s a different approach for Cairn Pacific: The developer, with Johnson and founding principals Tom DiChiara and Rob Hinnen, has been a major force in transforming the Slabtown neighborhood with large-scale mixed-use projects including the L.L. Hawkins and Leland James buildings.

Northbound Collective appears likely to become one of the largest multifamily projects to avoid Portland’s inclusionary housing ordinance. It requires developers of buildings with at least 20 multifamily units to designate a portion of them as rent-restricted or pay a fee in lieu.

“There’s no inclusionary housing encumbrance,” Johnson said. “The unit count was driven by design considerations that are unique to each building.”

Mechanical parking will be provided in a ratio of 0.45 spaces per unit.

On Monday, the Portland Bureau of Development Services sent other city bureaus a request for responses to the developer’s proposal.

For now, the project team is waiting on permission to extend roads in the area. Cairn Pacific plans to build portions of Northwest 30th Avenue, Roosevelt Street and Wilson Street around the development.

The streets were supposed to have been built out after a 1982 City Council resolution, but the Portland Bureau of Transportation simply never built them, Johnson said. Cairn Pacific must record plats for the new development, but can’t do so until the roads are built, he said.

The project team is in discussions with general contractors experienced in building with mass timber. The developer and architects are aiming to bring the efficiency, visual warmth and environmental benefits that mass timber has given large office projects to a residential scale.

“We think there can be quite a bit of efficiency using CLT in a smaller footprint,” Jones said.

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A new proposal in Northwest Portland shows how developers are getting increasingly creative to avoid Portland’s inclusionary housing thresholds.

Cairn Pacific is proposing six buildings, each with approximately 18 apartment units. With that arrangement, the developer can build about 108 units, with none required to be offered to low-income renters.

Portland’s inclusionary housing rules exempt buildings with fewer than 20 units. For larger buildings, developers must provide a proportional amount of apartments at rents affordable to people who earn less than either 60 percent or 80 percent of the Portland area’s median income, or pay a fee in lieu.

Noel Johnson, a principal at Cairn Pacific, said the proposed project would not be built if it had to include affordable units, which bring in less revenue for the developer.

“The reality is basically no projects pencil with inclusionary zoning,” he said.

Other developers have moved forward with projects that fall just below the 20-unit threshold. A 19-unit building is under construction at 4130 S.E. Division St. That building is from a limited liability company that lists Anita Chan as manager. It was designed by Baysinger Partners Architecture.

In a September 2018 report, the Portland Housing Bureau said the pace of constructing buildings with fewer than 20 units was in line with recent years. In 2017, 13 percent of building permits were for structures with fewer than 20 units, according to the Housing Bureau.

“This proportion is consistent with what has been occurring since 2012 as Portland emerged from the recession,” the report stated.

Still, 2017 saw the most such buildings constructed since 2012. Data for 2018 were not immediately available.

Gerard Mildner, a Portland State University real estate professor, said it’s not surprising developers are finding a way around inclusionary housing rules.

“Folks are really scratching their heads over this, and if it takes a lot of 18-unit buildings, they’ll do it,” he said. “I think a more likely reaction is to go to the suburbs.”

The 20-unit threshold is embedded in the 2016 state law that permitted municipalities – with Portland foremost in mind – to enact inclusionary housing ordinances. The law says inclusionary zoning rules “may apply only to multifamily structures containing at least 20 housing units.” Developers have responded by building multiple structures of fewer than 20 units on the same site.

Johnson said he expects to see more such projects.

“That’s kind of I think the new normal in terms of how Portland’s going to be producing housing in the short run,” he said. “The reality is we either produce housing, or we don’t produce housing.”

Portland has no flexibility to change the 20-unit threshold without a corresponding change in state law. Some small projects have included affordable units anyway.

“The Housing Bureau is encouraged that 14 residential projects with less than 20 units have voluntarily opted into the inclusionary housing program (paying the fee-in-lieu or providing affordable units) due to the incentives provided, and many others are considering doing the same,” stated Eileen Park, spokeswoman for Mayor Ted Wheeler, in an email. “The city will continue to consider options to incentivize more affordable housing.”

Cairn Pacific is best known for developing a series of large mixed-use projects in Northwest Portland’s former Con-way area, now rebranded as Slabtown. These include the Leland James and L.L. Hawkins buildings, with tenants such as New Seasons Grocery and Breakside Brewery.

This new proposal calls for a series of five-story buildings at 2123 N.W. 30th Ave., and the adjacent block. Jones Architecture is designing the buildings on 30th Avenue, and Waechter Architecture is designing the others.

Using different architects is meant to provide some variety in design, Johnson said. The new buildings will be next to townhomes designed by architect Rick Potestio for Cairn Pacific.

“I’m trying to get a potpourri of designers working in that area to get an eclecticity of design,” Johnson said.

Cairn Pacific’s intention is to create a walkable, livable neighborhood for families within a short jaunt to Forest Park, Johnson said.

The multifamily buildings will have amenities such as bike rooms, storage, common areas and at-grade parking. Cairn Pacific plans to use cross-laminated timber. The material has become popular for office projects in the Portland area, but not multifamily projects.

The proposed buildings are in early-stage design, Johnson said. They’re likely to be a mix of one-bedroom and two-bedroom units, with perhaps some three-bedroom units.

The small buildings will be sited on corners wherever possible, to give them more light and air and better energy performance, Johnson said.

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Larry Ferar was beginning to consider retiring from the Portland design firm he founded that focuses on wineries and distilleries. He needed a landing spot for his longtime employees.

Principals at Soderstrom Architects, who have known Ferar for more than 30 years, saw an opportunity to bring in work that would diversify their firm’s portfolio. They began talking, and let the idea ferment. As of Jan. 2, a blend was made.

Laurence Ferar and Associates is no more, but Soderstrom agreed to take on five employees, including three architects. The practice is now known as Ferar Studio.

“They’ve been financially a very viable company over the last decades that they’ve been in business, and they bring to our market-sector mix a whole different clientele, which I think adds stability to both companies as the economy ebbs and flows,” said Dan Van Calcar, managing principal at Soderstrom.

“They also have a very similar design approach to us,” Van Calcar added.

With the addition of Ferar’s people, Soderstrom now has 44 employees.

Larry Ferar first worked with Cameron Hyde, a founding partner of Soderstrom Architects, in the early 1980s while designing Beaumont Middle School. Ferar went on to start his own firm, and shifted focus to wineries beginning with a project for Adelsheim Vineyard in Newberg. Ferar met the Adelsheims when his wife taught their daughter.

Ferar & Associates ended up designing six phases of various expansions as Adelsheim Vineyard grew along with the popularity of Oregon pinot noir. Ferar and Associates went on to design numerous other wineries and tasting rooms, including Alexana and Van Duzer. Also, the firm was responsible for a master plan and conceptual design for Résonance Vineyard.

The work has expanded beyond Oregon’s wine country to Canada and New Zealand, and consulting on winery designs in China and England. Larry Ferar has also worked as a consultant with Olson Kundig of Seattle.

For its Oregon projects, Ferar Studio often works with Andrew Scott Construction in McMinnville.

Ferar Studio also designs distilleries, an area where Reed Lewis, an architect who became Ferar’s first employee in 1988, has expertise. The firm designed Clear Creek Distillery in Portland, among others. Those projects have become a larger portion of the studio’s portfolio.

“Clearly there’s a growing interest in distilleries and distilled products,” Lewis said.

Distilleries must be designed according to strict building codes because of high-proof alcohol’s volatility.

Ferar and Associates’ first winery projects were for production facilities only. That meant an industrial feel, with space for barrels and crush pads. But in recent years, wineries have placed more emphasis on tasting rooms and special events spaces. Vintners and distillers typically clear a higher profit on wine and spirits sold in-house rather than in off-site stores or bars.

For wineries, the emphasis on tasting rooms contributes to a growing desire to connect visitors with the agricultural environment. Larry Ferar believes his firm has designed more wineries than any other local firm, but competition in the market may be growing.

Waechter Architecture was hired by Furioso Vineyards in Dundee to design a tasting room and winery. It opened last summer, and received two American Institute of Architects awards – one from the Portland chapter and one from the Northwest and Pacific Region.

“We like that project in the sense that to do a successful winery project, you don’t have to have done an enormous amount of these projects before,” said Ben Waechter, principal architect. “You just have to be a good architect.”

The Furioso design used a concrete base and a fully transparent glass tasting room.

“We view our jobs as architects to distill information and to come up with a clear and concise design,” Waechter said. “We rely on experts to tell us what makes a good winery or what makes a good production facility, and we use that criteria to come up with a good design.”

Fieldwork Design and Architecture was also honored in 2018 by AIA Portland for the design of Day Wines in Dundee.

Development of new wineries tends to be countercyclical to economic trends, Ferar said. In downturns, wealthy individuals look for hard assets like real estate and can get more for their money in design and construction.

Soderstrom’s new winery studio adds to its legacy that began in 1984. The firm’s principals were involved in the creation of Pioneer Courthouse Square. Subsequently, the firm has focused on work for schools, local government buildings and health care providers. Soderstrom has a long relationship with the University of Portland, and has designed several buildings on the North Portland campus.

Larry Ferar, who started with a studio in his garage on Corbett Avenue, said he plans to retire within the next several years. Ferar Studio is currently working on designs for Abbott Claim Vineyard near Carlton, Portland Wine Co. – known for its Love & Squalor brand – and a winery in Kentucky.

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Preliminary plans have been submitted to build a 224-unit affordable housing complex on approximately 8 acres in Gresham’s Rockwood neighborhood.

According to city records, applicant Waechter Architecture has requested design review for a complex featuring multiple apartment buildings (all four stories) wrapping around a central community building.

The project site is comprised of two tax lots near the northeast intersection of Southeast Yamhill Street and 182nd Avenue. The property lies within an Open Space Overlay District in the Rockwood Town Center zone and would be subject to certain design regulations that don’t pertain to the rest of the city.

The Gresham Design Commission last month discussed the proposal with representatives of Waechter Architecture and Community Development Partners. At that meeting, according to a city staff summary, design commissioners asked about walking access for the site outside the complex and requested that the design be “permeable” for pedestrians.

Design commissioners want corner lot entries to face Southeast Yamhill Street and one of the future streets planned to bisect the property, the summary states. Southeast Yamhill Street is thus likely to be the public entryway into the central common space, with commissioners asking for an “active, engaging” facade.

According to public records, one of the two future streets would run north-south between Southeast 182nd Avenue and 187th Avenue. The other would run east-west along the property’s northern boundary.

The property owners are listed as Aspen Ho LLC, a corporation connected with Portland private equity firm Aspen Capital, and the Portland Lutheran Association.

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Waechter Architecture was one of 10 firms (one of three in the U.S.) to receive Architectural Record‘s Design Vanguard honor.

The award, which was announced in December, is given to emerging firms judged to be doing particularly innovative work.

Waechter Architecture principal Ben Waechter said the award was a result of the firm’s approach to creating bold architecture by using powerful spaces and avoiding novelty. The award also was a testament to the type of architectural work being done in Portland, he added.

“It shows that younger practices in Portland are doing internationally recognized work,” Waechter said.

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