In Seattle, a 1960s Roadside Motel Gets a 21st-Century Update

At the Civic Hotel, architecture firm Wittman Estes adapts jet-age lodgings for a new generation of traveller, while holding on to some mid-century aesthetics.

By: Lauren Gallow

Photography: Nic Lehoux

Capitalizing on the surge of road trippers whizzing across America after World War II, Seattle’s Imperial 400 Motel was part of a nationwide chain that established hundreds of roadside motels in the 1960s. Designed to welcome car traffic when it opened in 1962—particularly visitors coming to Seattle for the Century 21 Exposition, which was the Space Needle’s raison d’être—the Imperial 400 turned inward over the years with a series of additions intended to buffer ever-increasing road noise. Now the hotel has reopened with an updated design by local firm Wittman Estes, and a new name: the Civic Hotel.

Located at the entrance to the recently opened State Route 99 tunnel, a major infrastructure project, which shifted traffic away from the now-demolished elevated viaduct along Seattle’s 

waterfront, the Civic Hotel took advantage of the reduced noise level with the redesign. “We wanted it to be an anchor in the neighborhood,” says Neha Nariya, who owns the hotel with her father, Vrajlal Nariya. “We’re right at the ‘hello/goodbye’ corner with the tunnel’s yellow ventilation stacks behind us.”

Capturing this ethos of arrival and departure, Wittman Estes’ jet-city design concept improvises on the building’s midcentury origins. The firm wanted to honor the hotel’s historic roots, but without building a period piece, says architect Matt Wittman.