The site for the Ellis Residence is located on the Yeomalt Bluffs overlooking the central Puget Sound and downtown Seattle. A small cabin built in the 1930’s adorned the site. The cabin wasn’t of any historical significance and was not in particularly good shape. So, the question posed to these Bainbridge Island Architects was how to delicately and sustainably remove the existing cabin from the site. The answer…deconstruction rather than demolition. Rather than ripping the cabin to shreds and dumping these pieces in the landfill, we enlisted the help of ReStore. The Seattle based company took the cabin apart board by board. This careful deconstruction allowed us to recycle or reconstitute almost all of the existing structure. In the end, 97.8% of the cabin was diverted from the landfill. Neither deconstruction or demolition is currently a focus of LEED-H credits so this work will be filed as an Innovation credit.
