Gracemont Alumni Hall at The Bush School – 2024 Outstanding Stewardship Award

Historic Seattle’s Annual Preservation Celebration is coming up on September 19, 2024. We’ll celebrate the projects and people that help amplify our mission. Today, we feature the Gracemont Alumni Hall at The Bush School, the second 2024 Outstanding Stewardship Award recipient. 

Congratulations Gracemont Alumni Hall and The Bush School!

From its humble beginnings in 1924 with six students attending preschool and kindergarten in the living room of founder Helen Taylor Bush’s house in the Denny-Blaine neighborhood (133 Dorffel Drive, extant), to The Bush School of today, with more than 700 students in grades K-12, the educational institution has stood witness to Seattle history.

Gracemont Alumni Hall, circa 1915, was purchased by The Bush School in 1944. Originally a residence, the building was used as a boarding house for seventh through tenth graders and as classrooms for preschoolers. Today the iconic building houses administrative offices and classrooms and strategically thought-out spaces for students to study and gather across 12,000 square feet on four levels. The recently completed renovation and seismic retrofit of Gracemont Alumni Hall demonstrates The Bush School’s commitment to preserving history through stewardship of the historic building so closely tied to the school’s heritage.

The main goal of the project was to preserve as many of the historic materials and details as possible while integrating life-safety, accessibility, and energy performance upgrades for contemporary times while providing more space for a growing community.

The project team restored beautiful exterior masonry, ornate plastered ceilings and walls, and historic woodwork throughout the building. New modern mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and fire sprinkler systems, in conjunction with energy upgrades to the exterior envelope, ensure occupant comfort and energy efficiency. And critical safety elements added to the building’s structure create a safe building at the center of the upper campus.

While the new skylight-lit atrium and beautifully restored and preserved finishes steal the show visually, the new structural system within the building stands out as a masterpiece of planning, coordination, ingenuity, and execution. Getting the complex steel and diaphragm connections needed for seismic retrofitting into the building with minimal disruption to the existing historic structure of the building turns out to have been a challenge worth taking.

The Bush School chose its project team well, knowing that extensive experience with historic structures would be key to a successful project, one that melded rehabilitation best practices with an eye toward making much needed upgrades and improvements to carry the historic building through the next 100 years.

Congratulations to The Bush School and its project team members SHKS Architects, the Rafn Company, Degenkolb Engineers, PAE Engineers, LUMA Lighting Design, 4EA Building Science, Stantec, Cite Specific, and Bloom Projects, LLC

Image courtesy of Bloom Projects, LLC