Design Review Board

## Meeting Overview The City of Bellingham Design Review Board convened on October 1, 2024, at 3:00 PM for what would prove to be an unusually intimate and substantive discussion about a small but complex housing project. Chair Ryan Van Straten presided over a hybrid meeting, with board members Maggie Bates, Coby Jones, and David Heck attending alongside Planning Staff Emmy Scherrer and Administrative Staff Fiona Starr. Jan Hayes was expected to join later but did not appear during this session. This early design guidance meeting centered on a proposal to demolish an existing 1937 single-family home at 1209 East Laurel Street (formerly 1003 Otis Street) and replace it with four detached small-lot houses, each featuring a basement accessory dwelling unit. What made this project unique for the Design Review Board was its modest residential scale — a far cry from the typical mixed-use or large multifamily developments they usually review. The proposal sits within the Samish Way Urban Village's Residential Transition zone, triggering design review requirements despite its fundamentally single-family character. The applicant, Ali Taysi from AVT Consulting, representing property owner Demi Harmon and architect Matt Remsbecher from Slab Design/Build, presented a thoughtfully evolved project that had undergone significant changes since initial conception. The meeting would reveal both the challenges of fitting contemporary density goals into existing neighborhood fabric and the board's commitment to architectural quality even at small scales. ## The Evolution of a Small Lot Project Ali Taysi began his presentation with a crucial caveat about timing: the board was seeing a more developed design than typical for early guidance meetings, but this level of detail had been necessary to determine whether the project was financially viable at all. "Unlike a multifamily apartment building where we can come to you with some ideas in a box and ask for early feedback," Taysi explained, "we really had to fully bake this cake just to figure out if it was a project that was financially viable for Demi." The project's evolution told a story of regulatory complexity intersecting with market realities. Originally conceived years earlier as a four-unit attached townhouse development, the proposal had been shelved around 2018 due to prohibitive infrastructure costs. The urban village requirements demanded high-standard frontage improvements on both Otis and Laurel Streets, whi…