The Winston Townhomes reside between the classic craftsman bungalows of Seattle’s Ravenna neighborhood and a small commercial area featuring a community recreation center and a senior housing development converted from a historic brick school building.

"It’s a continued expansion of ways of thinking about libraries that started a while ago, and people are continuing to push the envelope when it comes to nontraditional library spaces. Whereas a few years back, it might have been people adding multipurpose spaces into their libraries, now we’re adding a demonstration kitchen and a recording studio and creating space for community partnerships. We have a Discovery Garden where we’re putting power in the outdoor seating elements." - Mona Johnston Zellers

Architecture firm Opsis Architecture of Portland, Oregon, and Seattle-based Johnston Architects (JA) collaborated on the $61.7 million building that took nearly two years to complete. The vision was to create a two-story building featuring state-of-the-art amenities on Redmond’s Municipal Campus that could elevate the community’s health, wellbeing, and vibrancy while connecting the civic side to the surrounding natural elements.

“The community’s experience of the building was the guiding principle of the design. Johnston Architects always strives to create a site-specific design and so look to the existing context for conceptual guidance. We identified, very early on, the idea of buildings embedded in lush landscape and Mercer Island’s strong network of community parks. This shaped the building’s site design strongly: it became a building set in a series of small urban pocket parks,” said McKay, an Island resident.

Accessibility in public spaces isn’t limited to considerations for people in wheelchairs. It spans the gamut of needs, from parents pushing strollers to people with neurological differences.

“We created this idea of a more community-focused living space where we could essentially have our cake and eat it too,” Dale said. “We could have all these amenities, we could stay in the city while also supporting each other and raising our kids together.”

Inspired by the nearby Sammamish River, the center’s design employs biophilic architecture to connect visitors with nature. Expansive wooden elements are exposed in the interior and exterior to create a warm and inviting atmosphere.