Duke’s South Lake Union

Making a restaurant renovation a reality. Duke’s Seafood and Chowder House needed to renovate an existing two-story office building for its new, 16,200 SF restaurant near Seattle’s South Lake Union waterfront. Duke’s vision was a banquet room and kitchen on the first floor, and restaurant and kitchen on the second floor. To make this project a reality, Reid Middleton’s structural engineers performed a seismic evaluation of the existing structure, conducted field investigations, and created reinforcement designs to meet the 2015 International Existing Building Code (IEBC) Life Safety structural performance objective and the standard of care for renovating this age and type of building. We enlarged the outdoor seating area by moving the exterior walls inward. Duke’s wished to relocate an elevator in the building, which our engineers accommodated by performing the necessary seismic analysis and design. Unfortunately, construction cost estimates for that part of the project were too high so Duke’s decided to leave the elevator in its original location. This triggered additional seismic analysis and structural re-design. Our engineers also designed a new exterior stair and reconfigured the interior stairs. We provided construction administration services.