Towering Trees — MARJORIE DESIGN

Role: Project Manager & Cohousing Expert

I have guided every phase of development from property acquisition to design and planning, leveraging my technical expertise and intimate knowledge of cohousing to ensure the successful realization of a 9-home community in North Seattle.

Crow Woods Cohousing is a developing cohousing community taking root in North Seattle. I was asked to be the project manager and client advocate when the project was just getting started. I have been involved in every stage of development and will continue to support the growth of this community until construction is complete.

Jane (owner of Towering Trees LLC) is the project's developer and this is her first development project. She needed project management and administrative support to realize her dream of creating a 9-home village in Seattle where she and her friends and family could live. She brought me on because of our past relationship working on cohousing development and because of my technical expertise and ability to serve as a go-between for the various consultants and herself.

Over the past two years, I have helped Jane search for, compare, and purchase property, including establishing the criteria that gave to our realtor. Once we found and purchases a beautiful urban site in a residential neighborhood, I helped Jane refine the programming for the community and for the individual units. We worked with our wonderful partners, Hybrid, and the future residents, to create a unit mix and design criteria. I also led the development of a visioning guide/packet that continues to inform the design of the community.

Once we had a sense of the vision and needs of the community, we worked with Hyrbid and our other consultants to develop initial site plans and unit designs. I helped Jane and the residents collaborate with the architects and made sure that their needs and expectations were clearly communicated to and executed by the design team. I produced sketches, site plans, and example imagery as needed to supplement detailed reports to the design and development team in order comprehensively document our plan and vision.

I have also supported Jane in reviewing and tracking the multitude of resources that emerge throughout the development process. I have every resource indexed in the Airtable base, as well as other helpful data such as meeting notes and tasks. In addition to tracking the resources, I have provided my technical expertise through the review and markup of relevant documents, such as periodic plan set review and analysis of the operating agreement for the LLC that Jane formed to develop the project. Through my detailed reviews, I have been able to ensure that key features and programmatic goals were adequately wrapped into the plans. I was also able to walk through these documents with Jane so that she understood everything they contained and so that her questions and concerns were documented and addressed in meetings with the design team. As the project continues to evolve, I will continue serve as Jane's right-hand-woman and liason to facilitate a smooth and successful design and construction process.