The Tree Farm Is a Wild New Office Building
You've probably seen Tree Farm already. It's impossible to miss, looming over the east side onramp of the Morrison Bridge, as close to the span as city planners will allow.
And you probably already have seen developer Kevin Cavenaugh's other wild construction, the angled, aggressively colorful Fair-Haired Dumbbell just a little further north on East Burnside. Cavenaugh doesn't do grey boxes. And Tree Farm is his latest charge in the war against boring architecture.
Sitting next to inner Eastside institutions Le Bistro Montage and City Liquidators and designed by Ben Carr of Brett Schulz Architects, the six-story office building will begin welcoming office tenants in the coming weeks. The ground floor will also be the new home of Lebanese restaurant Nicholas (which is moving from its longtime SE Grand location), a new bar (TBD), and a Cloudforest coffee shop.
But the real talking point of the building is its striking facade, which features a bright blue mural and 56 strawberry trees hung in steel planters from the sides.
Per a press release: "This truly unique project aims to provide an iconic response to the generic status quo of speculative office real estate in Portland today, with below-market rents aimed at smaller startups and companies that would not otherwise be able to afford space in a new construction mid-rise building."