Bellingham office building to be demolished to make room for apartments
A building near Bellingham’s Old Town neighborhood will soon be replaced with a three-story apartment building.
The Holly Street Apartments will be built at 1215 W. Holly St. with 11 market-rate rental units and an underground parking garage, according to Bellingham-based AVT Consulting, the permit consultant company for the project.
“Currently there is an office building there and the intention is to demolish that existing office space,” said AVT Consulting’s Riley Marcus.
The current building is the Bellingham office space for Jansen, a heavy civil engineering general contractor.
Six of the units in the new apartment building will be two-bedroom, two-bathroom spaces. Five of the units will be studios that are either 340 square feet or 352 square feet. Some units will have outdoor balconies with a waterfront view.
The area in front of the building is also expected to feature some usable outdoor space with tables and landscaping.
The underground parking garage will have 15 stalls. Eleven of those stalls will be part of a mechanical parking system.
“I like to think of it like a vending machine,” Marcus said in a telephone interview with The Bellingham Herald. “It creates more space for more stalls without having to expand the footprint of the building.”
Automated parking uses computer-controlled vertical lifts and horizontal shuttles or robotic valets to transport vehicles from an arrival area to a remote compartment for storage without human assistance, according to Parkmatic, a provider of automated parking systems.
Most automated parking systems can retrieve vehicles within three minutes. Though that can vary based on the system design and if multiple people are trying to get vehicles at once, according to Parkmatic.
Demolition and construction of the new project is expected to begin in 2024.
