(Image: Board and Vellum)

A Capitol Hill architecture firm has released designs showing what a new seven-story mixed-use apartment building being planned to puzzle-piece in between Capitol Hill classic night spots Chop Suey, Diesel, and Madison Pub will look like.

The seven-story, 138-unit Tanager Apartments are on track for a hoped-for 2025 opening, 15th Ave E headquartered Board and Vellum has announced.

“A new, mixed-use multifamily, development located above the Seattle staple nightclub, Chop Suey, will balance urban living with the beauty of the Pacific Northwest,” the design firm says. “Two towers will be situated around a courtyard teeming with vegetation and natural life — a forested oasis in the middle of a bustling neighborhood.”

(Image: Board and Vellum)

Board and Vellum says custom art on the side of the towers will pay homage to Seattle’s music and art scene.

CHS reported here in 2021 on early planning for a project from Euclid Development and the Capitol Hill-based architects and Board and Vellum, that would demolish the former La Panzanella bakery property at 14th and Union recently home to businesses including Oola Distillery, gay bar Union, Restaurant Zoe, and Bar Sue to make room for the new development.

In 2022, those plans were expanded with a property deal for the 1920-built Talbot Building garage on E Madison opening up a new jigsaw opportunity for a much larger project.

“We will wrap around the Diesel and Chop Suey,” T.J. Lehman of Euclid told CHS at the time, adding that the planned mixed-use project will be built to help make sure the lives of residents mix well with the popular nightlife spots below.

“People don’t rent at the corner of 14th and Union and want suburbs,” Lehman said. “If they want a gated community they live somewhere else.”

The agreement to acquire and develop the old Talbot Building garage as part of the project scuttled plans to create a new car dealership on the E Madison property sandwiched between Chop Suey and the Madison Pub. In 2018, CHS reported on early plans from 12th Ave’s Ferrari and Maserati of Seattle to expand onto E Madison with a new a new Alfa Romeo Seattle showroom and sales offices in the overhauled garage. The dealership purchased the 15,000 square-foot garage for $2.25 million.

The 14th and Union property, meanwhile, has been held by the Pasciutos, the family behind the much-loved La Panzanella bakery that called the corner home until the mid-2000s. Built in 1963, the bakery complex marked one of the last corners of light industrial use in a neighborhood that was dominated by auto row businesses and architecture in the early 20th century. Craft spirit maker Oola put the zoning to use in joining a small wave of microdistilleries opening on Capitol Hill in the 2010s but finally gave into real estate and cost pressures and moved to Georgetown during the pandemic.

The move followed more exits from the E Union property as Capitol Hill Southern-flavored Bar Sue lost its lease. Meanwhile, gay bar Union had previously announced it was exiting the building two years after it took over the former Restaurant Zoe space for a four-block move down Union near Broadway. It reopened there in March 2021.

Oola, meanwhile, is returning to the intersection with next week’s grand opening of its new bottle shop, cocktail bar, and restaurant in the former Marjorie space on the northeast corner of 14th and Union.

(Image: Board and Vellum)

It will be some time before the new Oola is serving residents of the new market-rate apartment project that will also add new street-level commercial space and underground parking for around 50 vehicles. The development is currently in the design phase after undergoing the first round of public design review last year under the city’s pandemic-era administrative review process.

It joins a smaller wave of new development that has quietly continued across the Capitol Hill area including this year’s opening of the LGBTQ-friendly affordable senior housing project Pride Place on Broadway, the nearly completed Heartwood mass-timber affordable apartment building across the street from the coming Euclid project on E Union, and the under construction seven-story, 37-unit apartment building and adaptive reuse overhaul of the landmark Knights of Columbus Building at Union and Harvard.

The architects at Board and Vellum say their new project will fit in with the neighborhood — and the nightlife neighbors, saying the Tanager Apartments “seek to balance the transitional nature of the area, highlighting an intimate residential experience within a bustling transit corridor and commercial center.”

“The buildings are in a transitional area, with lively East Madison to the north, a commercial core along East Union Street to the east, and an increasingly residential character moving south,” they write. “Balancing these contexts and uses is integral to the building’s orientation, massing, and overall design.”

(Image: Board and Vellum)

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