The Plan: Ellen Browning Building

April 2025

The Plan

Sociable Living: “Ellen Browning” Co-housing

Portland, Oregon, is a compact city that is known for its quality of life. Ten couples who are close friends and travel together decided to combine forces and create a shared living environment for their retirement years. Their children had moved on, and they no longer needed family homes. They found a good downtown site in a vibrant retail and commercial district and selected Hacker, an architecture firm that has already built four apartment blocks on the same street. It can be difficult to achieve a consensus among 20 people who have lived independently all their lives – needs and tastes vary widely – but the group trusted one couple with more experience in the development sector, along with their art-collecting daughter, to take the lead and deal with the architect on their behalf.

“We crafted a vision for what they wanted and gave them several alternatives”, explains principal-in-charge Corey Martin. “This one was quite different from the others. It grew out of connecting to the landscape and exploiting the south-facing elevation because the climate here is so dreary for nine months a year. That is our mission in life – to make people here happy by connecting them with much needed sunlight”.

His team designed a four-story, 3,160-sq. m block with expansive windows to pull in as much sunlight as possible. This co-housing is named Ellen Browning after an ancestor of the family that led the project, who was a journalist and philanthropist. Single-level apartments occupy the two middle floors, and there are ground-floor apartments for guests or future on-site medical caretakers, as well as a wine cellar. Street-level retail including an art gallery enlivens the mix and there is subterranean parking. The top floor provides shared amenities for all the residents, from cooking and communal dining to games, movies and swimming in a compact pool. There is a terrace for outdoor activities and these features...