The Piston & Ring building is located on 12th Avenue between East Pike and East Madison Streets, part of Seattle’s original “auto row” neighborhood that sprang up with the popularity of the automobile in the 1920s. The building’s heavy timber parallel chord truss design allowed for an almost 25-foot ceiling height and no interior columns, ideal for maneuvering and showing off new cars. Over the years, the building was home to a series of auto dealers, auto supply and auto repair shops, the most recent of which was the Piston & Ring company, before it was leased to the Cornish School for its theater scenery workshop. The building was significantly “altered” sometime after 1940; the storefront was removed and the front facade pushed back twenty feet to create an outdoor parking area.
Our renovation in 2006 created a new street façade that features operable transom windows over glazed roll-up garage doors. We carefully exposed the original board-formed concrete walls, wood floors and ceiling, and Douglas fir roof trusses that are up to three feet in girth. A mezzanine seating area was created above the main floor restaurant, and a section of roof was peeled off the back of the building to create a two-level terrace and a west-facing window wall that fills the interior spaces with light. The extraordinary height of the existing basement allowed us to insert a new lower daylight level of retail and outdoor spaces that will eventually connect to the courtyard of our future 11th Avenue project. We also did a full seismic and life safety retrofit of the building, and the adjacent elevator in the Agnes Lofts at 12th & Pike provides wheelchair and delivery access to all levels.
Our current tenants include Osteria La Spiga, Plum, Izilla Toys, Graham Baba Architects, Kennedy Architects and Dunn & Hobbes, LLC. Plum serves breakfast, lunch and dinner in a charming bistro setting and its menu is entirely vegan. Osteria La Spiga relocated their well-loved Italian restaurant to significant critical acclaim and paired it with a new wine bar that features live jazz several night a week. Izilla Toys occupies the north lower level and was recently named the Northwest's favorite independent toy store by Seattle Times readers.
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