Seattle’s Masonry: Collaborative Companies Designs and Builds Beer-Centric Seattle Restaurant 2nd Location in Fremont

The Masonry in Seattle, WA earned a reputation for mouth-watering wood-fired pizza and an impressive taplist soon after they opened their original 39 seat restaurant in Seattle’s Lower Queen Anne neighborhood in 2013.

The owners had always envisioned a larger second location to complement the original location and soon started their search for another restaurant with more space for bottle and keg storage and culinary experimentation.

The owners brought on Seattle design / build firm, Collaborative Companies, to help with the search and build out of the new restaurant. Collaborative designed the furniture for The Masonry’s original location and had a strong sense of the desired look and feel for the new space.

After seriously considering a few spaces in Pioneer Square and Downtown, Hess & Callahan Partners approached The Masonry about a new building in the heart of Fremont — a hip neighborhood just north of Queen Anne buzzing with restaurants, bars and big companies including Google, Brooks and Tableau. As fellow beer fanatics, Hess & Callahan Partners were attracted to The Masonry’s casual atmosphere and exotic beer selection. The new restaurant is located in a brand new 4,300 square-foot space that features 150 seats (plus another 60 outside), twenty-four draft lines and two temperature controlled bottle coolers—nearly 4x the amount of space as the original location with more than enough places to store flavorful beers from all over the world.

The major elements of the space including the wood-fired pizza oven, kitchen and bar with custom keg storage, were laid out before building completion and acted as the building blocks for the restaurant’s layout. The L-shaped restaurant is sectioned into spaces to serve the pizza bar, communal table space, beer bar, pub games and private event space.

The centrally located kitchen was strategically placed so it can easily service both the pizza and beer bars, while the communal tables were placed in the front of the floor- to-ceiling windows to engage with the street and create an indoor/outdoor dining experience in the warmer months.

With a core palette of concrete and glass, the Collaborative team decided to introduce a wood soffit to add warmth and materiality to the space, while also driving visual interest down into the restaurant and away from the exposed mechanical systems common in modern industrial office buildings.

The Birch soffit starts on the ground at the entrance of the restaurant, goes up the wall to the ceiling and then weaves through the space like one large brush stroke connecting all the different stations within the space. Maintaining the neutral palette of concrete and white left an opportunity to integrate pops of color into the space, which was one of The Masonry’s wishes. The soffit was hand painted by a San Francisco artist known for abstract murals. The Masonry also wanted to integrate an existing element from the original restaurant — the bottle pendant lights — which help to visually connect the two location.

Collaborative also selected a collection of Random Lights by Moooi to complement the pendant lights and establish a stronger street presence. The communal tables, wood storage, keg storage, and record player cabinet were all designed in-house by the Collaborative team. The owner’s and employees record collection features a variety of music from motown to hip- hop to create a casual- cool atmosphere. The new Masonry location opened in December 2017 and has quickly become a neighborhood destination for pizza and beer lovers alike.

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Collaborative Companies
10 Dravus Street
Seattle, WA 98109
p: 206.535.7908
info@collaborativeco.com
www.collaborativeco.com