Photo: brewbrooks/Flickr
With 120 stores crammed into 24 acres, it’s no wonder parking is always a nightmare at Seattle’s University Village. To address the problem, the shopping center has filed plans with the City of Seattle to add 100,000 square feet of commercial space and 915 parking spaces on four sites in the northwest part of the complex.
Shugart Wasse Wickwire will be the project’s architect, while Hewitt Architects will be the landscape architect. According to the Daily Journal of Commerce, the firms have outlined several options for each of the four building sites. These are the preferred options for each:
- To make room for a seven-floor parking structure called the West Garage, retail stores Anthropologie and Williams-Sonoma will be demolished, and 175 parking spaces will be displaced. The West Garage will have room for 915 vehicles, and will have 35,000 square feet of retail, restaurant and office space.
- Architects envision the creation of a single-story, 5000-square-foot West Plaza Building at a plaza next to the West Garage. The West Plaza Building will be a retail or restaurant building.
- Two single-story Courtyard Buildings will replace an existing parking area north of Starbucks, Village Maternity and stationery store Papyrus. Ninety parking spaces will be eliminated.
- A third-floor penthouse will come with the Village Center, a pair of two-story commercial buildings in a parking area north of the Room & Board store and former Barnes & Noble space. The buildings will total 40,000 square feet and will displace 78 parking spaces.
In total, the four projects would displace 343 existing parking spaces. That means the net number of new parking spaces would be 572.
If you’d like to see the proposal for yourself, Seattle’s Design Review Board is tentatively scheduled to get its first public look at the proposal at 6:30pm on December 19th. The presentation will take place at the Good Shepherd Center, located at 4649 Sunnyside Avenue North.
