Schuchart Named a Cool Space

Schuchart’s office was featured on Puget Sound Business Journal’s website today! Check out the article.

Natural light filters through windows of Schuchart’s downtown Seattle office and reflects off the glass walls into the large open space where employees work. A plaza with patches of grass and the Seattle Library can be glimpsed through the windows.

Schuchart built out this light-filled space at 919 5th Ave. a year and a half ago to make a more convenient home for its employees.

The general contractor previously was based on Seattle’s Queen Anne hill. But employees knew they had to move. Traffic on Mercer Street was getting untenable, and most of the employees commuted to the office via I-5 and the Mercer exit.

George Schuchart, president of Schuchart Corp., found the new office when he was out for a stroll in downtown Seattle in the summer of 2013. The company was planning to lease a nearby building, but then he saw a “For Sale” sign.
“I spent 20 minutes peering in the window,” he said. “I thought, ‘why wouldn’t this work?’ So we did it.”
The company demolished the existing wine bar Sip and built out the space.

The inside is built to be open and collaborative, with benches for work stations.

“With this kind of environment, everyone has a sense of what others are doing,” Schuchart said.
The 6,400-square-foot office space won the 2014 commercial interior of the year award from the local branch of a commercial real estate development association, NAIOP. The office was designed by architecture firm Gensler.
Schuchart focuses on constructing sustainable buildings, and its own office is no exception.

“We worked with the existing light fixtures and re-used them and took advantage of the natural light,” Schuchart said.

The company now employs 30 people in the downtown office, and 115 employees overall. That number is growing, especially as the tenant improvement division explodes, Schuchart said.