The Modera Broadway development set to embrace E Howell’s approach to Cal Anderson and replace Broadway’s Bonney Watson funeral home and its surface parking lot with twin seven-story, market rate apartment buildings will go in front of the design review board for what the developers and its team of architects hope will be the third and final session Wednesday night.

“Although development will occur on two separate parcels, the buildings will be designed to create one cohesive resident community with shared management, ample resident amenities and outdoor space,” developer write about the project. “Design will incorporate opportunities for maximizing light and views to the apartment homes, creating overlooks and encouraging people-watching. The buildings will work together toward a shared design concept with similar massing, materials and detailing in support of creating a vibrant transit-oriented development.”

CHS reported here on the project from Mill Creek Residential as it shaped up for review earlier this year. The board decided the project could move forward to the final recommendation phase but wanted to see more done with E Howell and the development’s eastern flank facing Nagle and Cal Anderson Park as well as address a unifying design across the two separate structures that make up the project.

“The board gave very clear direction to provide a simple and refined design on the basis of a very clear design parti, with specific weight given to providing a Chicago-school style Pike/Pine auto row era design,” the architects from Weber Thompson write. “With that the project team simplified the design providing distinct representations of the brick grid structures seen throughout Capitol Hill, studying the proportion and rhythm of existing buildings throughout Capitol Hill and applying a sibling relationship between the north and south structures through coloration and horizontal articulation to the north and vertical to the south.”

As designed, the two buildings will add around 228 units of market rate housing to Broadway along with more than 16,000 square feet of commercial space and underground parking for 124 vehicles despite the project’s close proximity to Capitol Hill Station.

CHS first reported that Mill Creek was acquiring the Broadway property last October with plans for mixed-use development just south of the Capitol Hill Station projects. In December, Seattle’s Landmarks Preservation Board unanimously rejected the nomination of the 1961-built Bonney-Watson Funeral Home calling the modern-style building underwhelming, boxy, and, depressing.

Bonney-Watson’s Seattle history dates to 1868. In 2013, CHS talked with CEO Cameron Smock about the history — and future — of the funeral home.

The new project will harken back to the neighborhood’s auto row history — not its mortuary past — for its design finishes and materials with a mix of brick and sheet metal styling:

Wednesday night, if a memo from city staff to the project’s designers is any guide, look for the board to drill in on the north building’s proposed design elements including the “the fenestration amount and design within the frames” to provide more visual distinction between the two structures. You can also expect more questions about the planned live/work units along Nagle and whether that type of commercial activity is worthy of the street and the park it will look out on.

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