SEQUIM — Olympic Meadows, with its 233 units and four-story central building, “is an assault” on the neighborhood, said soon-to-be neighbor Inie Jenkins.
But the Meadows, Avamere Health Services’ senior-care campus at Fifth Avenue and McCurdy, is also within zoning requirements. And groundbreaking is slated for early 2007.
Despite more than 40 impassioned letters, a meeting room packed with protesters Tuesday night and a petition decrying the project’s 50-foot structure, the Sequim Planning Commission granted Avamere a permit to build.
Olympic Meadows will cover 14 acres with a variety of euphemistically named units.
There will be independent living “cottages,” assisted living units and a 28-unit Alzheimer’s, or “memory care,” facility.
This is a “continuing care retirement community,” said Nancy Hubbard, one of six representatives of the Wilsonville, Ore.-based Avamere.
The Meadows will allow residents to “age comfortably,” Hubbard told the Planning Commission.
Walking paths will weave through the complex. A 7,000-square-foot wellness center will be open to residents.
The development will have 42,000 square feet of open space. And the building footprint will be in the neighborhood of 190,000 square feet.
Avamere will employ a “Northwest craftsman style” of architecture with shingles and imitation stone, according to architect Dan Purgiel, the company’s architect in Portland, Ore.
Only one of the Meadows’ buildings will be 50 feet tall, and it will be positioned in the midst of landscaped grounds and single-story structures, Purgiel said.
