A 12-storey mass timber office tower planned for downtown Bellevue would carry 49 per cent less carbon than a conventional building, with Skanska putting 205,000 rentable square feet of office across eleven floors on a full city block. That is according to Charlie Foushée, Executive Vice President and Regional Manager for Skanska USA Commercial Development’s Seattle market, whose team released renders for the Bevel tower on Wednesday and expects city design signoff by late summer.
“Bevel is being designed with those principles at its core,” Foushée said of a workplace built around connection, wellness, and a sense of place, with the tower rising beside The Eight, Skanska’s recently finished Bellevue office building now 90 per cent leased.
Turning that figure into a building has fallen to two practices, with Seattle firm Mithun leading the design alongside London-based Waugh Thistleton Architects, the mass timber specialists brought in for their engineered-wood work. Their scheme puts eleven office floors above an activated ground plane on a side-core layout.
Mass timber carries the floors above ground, though a steel core stiffens the tower and five levels of concrete parking run below grade, putting the 49 per cent figure on a hybrid structure rather than an all-timber one. Every number in the developer’s published materials is described as subject to change while design and permitting continue.
Timber stays exposed in the lobby ceilings and columns, with 14-foot floor-to-floor heights and 10-foot windows running the office perimeter. A structurally upgraded bay in the southwest corner would carry assembly loads for large team gatherings, and a 21-foot south-facing operable wall opens an indoor deck on every level.
Beyond the office floors, the ground plane holds a café, a lobby, 1,500 square feet of retail, and 2,500 square feet of gathering space under 24-foot ceilings, with bike storage and locker rooms behind. The 6,000-square-foot rooftop garden crowns the building, three blocks from Bellevue’s light rail station.
The developer is targeting LEED v4 Platinum, Fitwel 2-Star, and Salmon-Safe ratings for a building with no natural gas connection and that reuses 95 per cent of rainfall captured on site.
It comes as a wave of tall timber towers rises across the United States, though nearly all of the tallest are homes rather than workplaces, from Milwaukee’s 31-storey Edison now under construction to a 29-storey plyscraper planned for downtown St Louis. Offices have trailed that residential wave, and Skanska is building without an anchor tenant signed, with CBRE running the pre-lease campaign on floors that the developer offers to a single occupier.
Bevel is not the contractor’s first move into engineered wood, with Skanska having already brought mass timber and green steel into its US construction and now placing the material in a Pacific Northwest market where technology firms have driven timber demand. Redmond-based Microsoft, whose first mass timber data centres opened in 2024, is one of the technology companies pushing wood into commercial construction. Construction is expected to start late in 2026 on the developer’s timeline, with the tower opening in 2028.
