Royal Residence (© Jeremy Bittermann/JBSA)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
It was a beautiful September day, just before the wildfires, when I visited the Royal Residence and stood in its signature space, surrounded by forest.
The house, named for the street on which it's built, just off Skyline Boulevard on the edge of Forest Park, is quite striking. Descending down a hillside, it's basically a series of black metal and glass-ensconced rooms that begin with the great room as you walk in the front door. Of special note is how the extended living area cantilevers out over the hillside to fully take in the forest view.
Standing in that cantilevered portion, with glass on three sides and nothing but gorgeous evergreen trees in view, I felt totally enveloped. The cantilevered portion makes the living room feel a bit oversized, or like two small living rooms attached to each other. But who cares? That experience was wonderful enough that how the furniture is arranged becomes secondary.
"I toured a potential buyer through here the other day. She literally started crying," firm co-founder Daniel Kaven explained during the tour, as we checked out the view. "She was so struck by the view and everything. She came up here from Silicon Valley and got very emotional. She couldn’t even believe it."
Royal Residence (© Jeremy Bittermann/JBSA)
Kaven went on to explain that he designed into the living room a full-height bookshelf to serve as a divider between the two rooms. "This was kind of this cozy area," he said, pointing to the front area, "and this was kind of this reveal space," he added, pointing to the cantilevered space with the view. "But after we got into construction, I just kept coming in the front door and thinking, ‘There’s just no way you can cover that view when you come in.’"
The kitchen, adjacent to the cantilevered living room, benefits from a roof line that extends outward to meet it. Just beyond the kitchen island are large operable glass doors that allow one to bring in a bounty of fresh air without being exposed to the elements.
And in case that floor-to-ceiling glass that the whole great room looks through didn't bring in enough light, there is also a huge skylight over the kitchen island. The house's interior could easily be dark simply because there isn't a lot of light coming from this forested setting. Yet it feels almost as bright as being outside, or perhaps even brighter.
The Royal Residence was built on spec and is intended as the first in what could be as many as nine new homes on nine new lots. William/Kaven's development wing, Kaven and Company, has purchased most of the land near here, just off Skyline Boulevard in the West Hills.
"There were a lot of limitations to how we could build," Kaven says. "We could only disturb 5,000 square feet of the whole 20,000-square-foot property."
Royal Residence (© Jeremy Bittermann/JBSA)
Kaven also confesses that he's had some frustration getting these projects going.
"They’re trying to put these further protection layers on these lots that were created to have housing on them 70 years ago," he says, adding a directive to the city itself. "‘You guys need to focus on doing this outside the urban growth boundary.’ That is what that boundary is for. But to suppress the housing here because there’s this supposed one-foot dry creek bed that runs through part of this property is housing suppression. That’s why we don’t have affordable housing. The city has all of these extreme barriers to get stuff built. This house took like four years to get built. I mean, that’s kind of what you’re up against. You can’t create affordable housing when those are those kinds of barriers. Some people will be like, ‘Oh, this is just housing for a wealthy person.’ No. It is all housing."
There's a couple things to untangle there.
One, obviously, is how the city approaches private property that's adjacent to the borders of Forest Park. Looking at the Royal Residence on a map, it's easy to think it's actually part of the park itself. And by the time my car reached this house, I'd traveled to near the bottom of a ravine. I wouldn't be surprised if there are legitimate ecological reasons not to allow development on this land. But I can also see why one has to allow property owners to either fish or cut bait: to outright restrict development or to give the green light.
Two, there is the question of how the overall supply of housing affects market rates. In theory, Kaven may be right that if, say, eight homes are built and sold here, it means eight fewer potential buyers of some low-rent Portland apartment that's converted into a high-end condo. An increase in supply is proven to reduce scarcity. Even so, directly connecting environmental approval for a lucrative house site to the crisis of affordable housing feels a bit...convenient.
Yet I can understand an architect-developer feeling like pulling off a high-quality speculative development is an endeavor with many potential pratfalls. Even when the economy is booming, it takes a lot to shepherd a land parcel all the way through the construction of a beautiful house. Now that Covid-19 has delivered a haymaker to the economy and our national leadership is too clueless, self-serving and corrupt to get up off the canvass, real estate development is less of a sure thing. And the more the process drags out, the more it could seem like the Royal Residence may not lead to a Royal (Boulevard) family of houses.
One way or the other, though, I expect Daniel Kaven and his architect-partner, Trevor Lewis, to make this happen. After all, this forested setting is not the first place they've engaged in a multi-project, multi-year effort.
Silica (Daniel Kaven) and Parallax (© Jeremy Bittermann/JBSA)
Take the group of projects they've built on the Williams Avenue-Vancouver Avenue corridor, starting with 2007's North House, a triplex residence, and continuing in recent years with the Silica office building in 2018 and the new Parallax building, with 66 market-rate apartments over ground-floor retail. Silica, which I wrote about two years ago, is a gorgeous synthesis of heavy timber and glass. Parallax is a more handsome, high-quality version of the ubiquitous five-over-one residential building.
Of course the best-known William/Kaven project is not any of these neighborhood buildings but a pair of ultra-tall towers the firm proposed for the Broadway Corridor site. They were never part of any official plans or even, to my knowledge, an official proposal made to Prosper Portland as part of its developer-based selection process. But ultimately these towers got a lot more press than anything else to do with the multi-year, ongoing Broadway Corridor effort centered around the site on North Broadway being vacated by the US Postal Service.
Broadway Corridor towers rendering (William/Kaven Architecture)
A nearly 1,000-foot-tall building was always a non-starter here, let alone two of them. After all, the city's tallest building, the Wells Fargo Center, is at 546 feet only a little more than half that size. But William/Kaven still got something out of the design, and so did we. Prosper Portland-managed developments can have a lot of strengths, mainly to do with a focus on equity and stakeholder consensus. But the deals, part of complex agreements that can succeed or fail based on which direction the economy is headed, can sometimes fall through, and even when they don't, eye-catching architecture is not high on the list of priorities. Take Centennial Mills, where the preservation of the remaining historic flour mill building and the creation of open space along the river as stipulated by the master plan seems to get second or third billing after new buildings and parking, even after three failed development agreements going back a decade. The Kaven-designed towers challenged us to think bolder, about both architecture and density.
To bring it all back around to the Royal Residence, I suppose the feeling you'd get from an observation deck on one of those towers is not wildly dissimilar to the feeling you get in the cantilevered living room there. A house and an office need to do practical things, of course. But I think William/Kaven Architecture has a talent for glassy architecture that harnesses emotion as much as a minimalist design language, even if they are entrepreneurs as much as they're architects — or maybe because of it.
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