Ever have a nightmare that you just’re again at school? Now think about it is a good dream—since you’re dwelling in a fantastically up to date apartment, one which stored all the beautiful elements of a historic elementary and ditched the lunchroom meals and homework.
Residents’ battle to maintain the West Queen Anne Elementary Faculty open amid financial downturn and concrete flight landed the neighborhood fixture on the Nationwide Register of Historic Locations in 1975—the primary Seattle college to earn the respect. The ultimate bell rang simply six years later. However historian Larry Kreisner says that these efforts helped protect the constructing for its second life as a “nationwide mannequin for salvaging surplus colleges.”
Rigorously transformed into 49 residential items in 1984, the traditional nineteenth-century brick constructing maintains an excessive amount of unique character. Historic photographs of schoolkids dot the hallways—the boys in slacks and button-downs, the ladies with “massive white bows of their hair,” says itemizing agent Susan Mudarri—giving the place a McMenamins-style tie to the previous. From the road, one may fairly assume that class remains to be in session.
This top-floor unit, although, feels straight out of 2024. The high-ceilinged house, one among 12 within the constructing with a sunny deck minimize into the roofline, feels vibrant and spacious. An up to date, galley-style kitchen options high-end home equipment and glossy finishes, like quartz counter tops, gleaming subway tiles, and European white oak flooring.
Fairly lounge wall panels give a refined nod to the constructing’s classic character, accommodating a twin-size Murphy mattress and an leisure heart behind them. “I like the best way the apartment combines the most effective of each worlds,” Mudarri says.
Within the massive loft-style bed room, lit by a single skylight, trendy cable railings and recessed lighting keep a minimalist, ethereal look. An en suite rest room (there’s one other half-bath downstairs), a stacked washer and dryer, and customized closet cabinetry hold quotidian practicalities simply hidden from visitors’ view.
And there shall be visitors. Molly Moon’s Do-it-yourself Ice Cream and Caffe Fiore, two favorites of the present proprietor, sit on the identical avenue because the apartment constructing; the Queen Anne department of the Seattle Public Library, the college’s peer on the Nationwide Register of Historic Locations, is only a block up the hill. Pickleball courts, parks, and pizzerias supply a healthful slice of Queen Anne’s wealthy city life-style.
The neighborhood that noticed this place as value saving nonetheless shines, too. Neighbors look ahead to one another’s packages and ship welcome flowers to new residents. “Alternatives similar to these at West Queen Anne Elementary Faculty exist,” Kreisner wrote when the college underwent its Nineteen Eighties transformation. “However to reach such alternatives requires a really particular mixture of elements.” Right here, that mixture feels fantastically maintained.
