The Whittaker is one building with five owners and one long renovation. What follows is the short version of how it came to look like this, and the principles we try to keep when we run it.
Whittaker & Sons opens at 1023 NW 12th Avenue — six stories of Douglas fir framing and brick. The looms run on the second and third floors, the offices on the fourth, the watchmen sleep on the seventh. Light came through twenty-foot operable factory windows, north-facing for the work.
Textile production moves to North Carolina. The building goes through three owners and four uses — a paper distributor, a print shop, a warren of small workshops, and for most of the seventies, mostly empty. The Pearl District wasn't the Pearl District yet.
A developer files for permits to demolish the building and put up condos. The Bureau of Cultural Resources flags it. A neighborhood preservation effort, funded by a Powell's family trust, buys the building for $1.4M. It sits, secured, for fifteen years.
Architect Mira Olsen presents a renovation that keeps every original timber column, every operable window, and the freight elevator. The plan: forty-two rooms, a ground-floor restaurant, and a rooftop bar with seventh-floor access. Construction begins in October.
The Whittaker opens with thirty-eight rooms. Four more are added the following spring. The Linden opens three months later with Chef Marisol Kerr in the kitchen — she'd been at Le Pigeon, looking for a smaller room. The Roof opens in May, on the first night without rain.
We have the same forty-two rooms, the same restaurant, the same bar. The art on the lobby walls changes every six weeks — a rotation of Portland-based artists curated by Stephanie Snyder, formerly of the Reed Cooley Gallery. The records on the turntables change quarterly. The cocktail list, monthly. The rest, we try to leave alone.
These aren't marketing claims. They're the operating rules of the property, written down on a single page and reviewed every year with the staff.
Every original Douglas fir column is in place. The factory windows still open. The freight elevator still runs. Where we couldn't save something, we said so on a small brass plaque.
Twenty-eight full-time staff. Living wages, health benefits including dental, eighteen days paid time off. The bartenders own a small share of The Roof.
All electric since 2024 (the wood stoves in the Suites are catalytic and run on certified-clean cordwood). Building runs on PGE green power. Linens, towels, and soap from regional makers within 200 miles.
Working with curator Stephanie Snyder, the lobby and second-floor halls function as a rotating gallery for Portland-based artists. Six-week cycles, opening events on First Thursdays. We've sold three hundred pieces in five years; the artists keep 100%.
"The point of this building, before it was a hotel, was that it held the work of a lot of careful people. We try to remember that."
The lobby tour runs Saturdays at 11am, free, no reservation.