Linda Pruitt
The Latest Development in Not-So-Big Construction
The cozy neighborhood is the stuff of modern-day fairy tale, a varicolored palette of tidy craftsman bungalows clustered around a resplendent garden courtyard. It’s called Conover Commons Cottages, the latest development of The Cottage Company, a new kind of home developer inspired by old ways.
Founded by Linda Pruitt (MBA 2001) and her husband, veteran builder Jim Soules, the Cottage Company is building cohesive communities of modestly sized, expertly built houses that address both the demographic trend toward smaller households and a backlash against conventional new construction that delivers massive size at the expense of quality materials and craftsmanship.
So Pruitt and Soules are building small and green, using renewable or recycled materials where possible, energy efficiency as standard, and finishing with artisan millwork, built-ins and detailing. Moreover, the design of their developments actually fosters community.
“Creating design and function of living spaces is not unlike the product development of a coffee maker or sweater,” Pruitt says. “How do you distinguish yourself in the marketplace? Defend your reason to be? What’s missing that consumers desire? For me this is the ultimate consumer product.”
Pruitt knows consumer products. She was a merchandising manager for Federated Department Stores for 15 years before starting at the UW Business School in 1999. Meanwhile her husband was taking a vested interest in new cottage housing development codes being adopted in Seattle’s satellite communities. These new codes allowed for development of “bungalow courts,” popular in the early 20th century that went extinct when post-WWII codes favored sprawling suburbs.
Soules took great interest in the loving restoration of Seattle’s 1915 era Pine Street Cottages, then built a brand new kindred community, Third Street Cottages on Whidbey Island. Each of eight darling cottages sold immediately, and the project captured the attention of Sunset, Metropolitan Home and HGTV. “People came from all over the country just to see it,” Pruitt says. “So clearly this piqued my interest.”
The couple then built another community in Shoreline which also sold quickly and won an AIA national housing award. “Cute, cool houses,” Pruitt says, “but I still wasn’t completely convinced this was a real business.”
Then she saw her promising 2001 Business Plan Competition finalist, the Glass Foundry at Sand Point, fizzle after 9/11. And her post-graduation job on Andersen Consulting’s national retail industry team went poof after Enron.
It was time to make The Cottage Company a real business. Pruitt and Soules ramped up their schedule, finished six developments from Bainbridge to Redmond, and have many more in the pipeline, including Conover Commons Homes, a cloister of 12 family-sized homes. There have been more awards, more articles, more chapters in influential books on less-is-more development. And they plan to keep going as long as the demand goes unmet.
“These projects are seen as models of national importance,” Pruitt says. “It helps to show people the way to another housing choice that doesn’t exist in conventional single-family development.”