Crafting New Life into Bush School's Historic Gracemont Alumni Hall
The Bush School is an independent private school in the Denny-Blaine neighborhood of Seattle with over 700 students in grades K–12. Over the past year and a half, the Rafn Company and SHKS Architects have renovated and upgraded the Gracemont Alumni Hall building to serve the school for years to come.
The Building
Bush School’s circa 1915 Gracemont Alumni Hall building is a historic mansion designed by Kirtland Cutter, the same architect who designed the Stimson-Green Mansion. The building was once owned by Grace Hefferman Arnold and was sold to the school in 1944. Located in the Upper Campus, it houses administration offices and classrooms across 12,000 square feet on four levels.
This complex renovation and seismic retrofit project restored and preserved the historic building while giving it new life. The team restored beautiful exterior mansory, ornate plastered ceilings and walls, and historic woodwork throughout the building. New modern mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and fire sprinkler systems, in conjunction with energy upgrades to the exterior envelope, ensure occupant comfort and energy efficiency. And critical safety elements added to the building’s structure create a safe building at the center of the Upper Campus.
Putting the Pieces Together
While the new skylight-lit atrium and the beautifully restored and preserved finishes steal the show visually, as craftspeople, what really excites us is how all the pieces come together. The new structural system within the building stands out as a masterpiece of planning, coordination, ingenuity, and execution.
Getting the complex steel and diaphragm connections into the building with minimal disruption to the existing historic structure of the building was a challenge worth taking. To complete the task, we cut holes in 8 places through the roof of the building and craned in 30-foot steel beams vertically down through the roof, turning some horizontally for placement and others down the inside of the exterior walls past three floors to precisely land on anchor bolts in the basement. The new structural steel went together perfectly and tied in the floors just as it was designed to do.
To tie the exterior walls to the floors of the building and keep them from failing in an earthquake, we poured concrete “grout pockets” around the majority of the perimeter wall on the 2nd and 3rd floors (and up the gables). This concrete acts as the glue to stabilize and tie the exterior walls of the building to a collector strap system across the floors to the new central concrete elevator shaft. Our craftspeople installed solid wood blocking, 1/4″ thick steel plates, and over a thousand angle brackets with over ten thousand screws to tie the whole system together. This all occurred in the 2nd floor system above the historic plastered ceilings, 3rd floor system, and roof structure.
The Result
Quality renovation work relies heavily on the quality of people on the job. The Rafn Company is proud to have provided an opportunity for our long-tenured carpenters to teach these renovation and restoration skills to our next generation of craftspeople.
The result is a beautiful and safe building for the Bush School and quality craftspeople for the next project.