Urban Export: Brighton Park at Issaquah Highlands offers live/work townhomes with commercial entrances at street level. Noland Homes closed on 73 homes in 2007 (its best year on record) and expects to close 80 this year.
Credit: Linc Lippincott
Village Vibe
Old urbanism fills an entrepreneurial void in a best-selling master plan.
When you’ve got the right stuff, sometimes a winning niche finds you, as Seattle builder Jim Noland can attest.
For eight years, Noland Homes focused almost exclusively on infill townhomes within a three-mile ring of downtown Seattle. Catering to young, eco-minded buyers with a penchant for dogs and sidewalks, Noland knew a thing or two about small footprints, walk scores, sustainable building methods, and mixed-use.
At first, when master plan developer Port Blakeley Communities approached Noland with an offer to do Brighton on Park, a 16-unit live/work project in its award-winning Issaquah Highlands community (some 17 miles outside city limits), Noland was a little perplexed, given his company had no experience in a master planned environment. But Port Blakely president Judd Kirk knew what he was doing; he wanted a builder partner who could authentically carry an urban village prototype into a suburban setting.
“Judd Kirk was the one who steered us toward live/work. It’s hard to find office space when you’re a start-up, and there are lots of them here,” Noland says, referencing the region’s fabled history of incubator ventures, Amazon and Google among them. “Ultimately this was a simple case of old urbanism versus new urbanism. Issaquah has small lots in a compact environment ... so what he was asking for wasn’t monumentally different than what we’d been doing.”
Credit: Kevin Reuter
The townhomes at Brighton on Park are Built Green four star and Energy Star certified with standard features including hands-free faucets, high-performance appliances, RainScreen technology, and tankless hot water heaters. Units ranging from 1,995 to 2,100 square feet include two-car garages, but are walkable to shops, bistros, and acres of parks and trails.
Riding this success, the builder recently broke ground on Brighton on High, a promenade of 24 live/work brownstones with ground-floor retail. Once complete, they will serve as a gateway to the Issaquah neighborhood of Vista Park. “Now anyone who drives into the community has to go by one of my buildings,” Noland says. “We’ve become part of the urban fabric here.”
Competitive Advantage
The Niche: Urban-Style Townhomes
What prompted Port Blakely to pursue Noland Homes? The builder’s third-party Guild Quality customer satisfaction rating of 97 percent surely didn’t hurt. “Our best salespeople are our homeowners, so we bend over backwards to make sure they are happy,” says Noland Homes founder Jim Noland. “We will go into homes that we built six years ago and fix things if needed.”