Downtown Puyallup, Washington is the historic center of a city of 40,000 situated where the Seattle-Tacoma metroplex meets a rich agricultural landscape featuring world-class hops and commercial daffodil croplands. ‘Seasons on Meeker’ is an exemplar high-density, mixed-use development and master plan spanning multiple underutilized parcels that seeks to catalyze regeneration of the downtown core, expand the pedestrian activity center through a new festival street running transverse to the existing commercial main street and offer potent opportunity to galvanize a strategic intention to activate Downtown through commercial and retail activities tied to local agricultural strengths: craft brewing and beer-centered dining and retail experiences.

Team leader Brian Vanneman helped the City of Puyallup develop a downtown vision and organize and execute specific plans, such as the Seasons on Meeker development, that are leading to the actualization of a more vibrant and sustainable future for Puyallup’s downtown core, reinforcing its position as a local and regional activity center and increasing its land value, utilization and tax base. Team members Matt Brown and Tiffany Lai developed an urban design and specific programming concepts for Seasons on Meeker that establish a new walkable activity node anchored by an urban brewery and micro-tenant food hall in a re-used building, and delivering multiple housing types and tenures, from flatted mid-rise apartments to ground level live-work lofted apartments to two- and three-story for-sale and for-rent townhomes. Brown and Lai inventoried local historic building fabric to develop copacetic design patterns, materials and massing. Parking needs were carefully analyzed, and methods for shared and smart parking and urban design typologies that reduce the visual and physical impact of parking were deployed.

Seasons on Meeker demonstrates our team’s unique ability and experience to understand and manage the process of strategic planning from concept to actualization. The wisdom garnered from playing a leading role in the delivery of the keystone projects and public realm improvements influences our approach to strategic planning, increasing the likelihood that plans will manifest.