The Seattle Times has a brief story on the first condo to close at the Four Seasons, $7 million buys an unfinished shell atop posh hotel:
The Wrights don’t have the distinction of buying Seattle’s priciest condo ever. According to county records, that honor goes to the Brian J. Marks Living Trust, which bought Unit 2700 in the 27-story One Pacific Tower at First and Virginia for $8.375 million in January.
But the two transactions really aren’t comparable.
Four Seasons spokesman Roger Nyhus says the Wrights bought their new home in “shell and core” condition. That means unfinished. Raw concrete. Presumably they will bring in their own designers and contractors to finish the job — at additional, and probably considerable, expense.
Update: This week The Stranger is also running a story about the Four Season, Leaves of Glass. Charles is clearly in love with NBBJ and writes a lot of blah blah blah:
The principle of the design is to incorporate the themes of nature into the colors and textures of the building itself. Here we have, as with Lawrence Halprin and Angela Danadjieva’s 1976 Freeway Park—the first work to activate in a large way this coding/meaning-making system in our city—the blending of the new and the past, the wild and the man-made, the tree and the concrete, the outside and the inside, the mountains and the buildings.
I would have preferred a more critical look at why the east side of the building, the one that faces 1st, is so disastrously bland. The east side clearly acknowledges the seediness of its surroundings and turns its back on them instead of trying to break out of the seediness and bring a new fresh look to 1st.
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