Aegis Mercer Island

Upscale Senior Living

We’ve partnered with Aegis Living to bring to life beautiful, upscale senior living communities across the region. Our most recent, Aegis Mercer Island, gave us the ability to create a totally one-of-a-kind space.

At Home in the Pacific Northwest

Aegis Mercer Island was designed to resemble a Pacific Northwest grand lodge. The building opens onto a stunning main lobby waterfall that’s fourteen feet high and thirty-five feet wide. Elsewhere in the property are design touches that honor local culture and activities, such as boats, camping RVs, and indigenous sculpture.

Aegis Mercer Island is a working senior community, with eighty-nine units: seventy-three assisted living and sixteen memory care homes. But it is much more than that.

Our scope included every amenity a resident could need. We built a fitness center, swimming pool, a beauty salon, a commercial kitchen and restaurant-style dining room, a top-floor sky lounge, and even a movie theater with a ticket booth. Outdoors are several courtyards and gardens, and a four-story exterior fireplace for gathering on cool nights. 

For residents, this creates a dynamic, fun place to call home. For us, it presented a bunch of mini design and building projects, all rolled into one. The exceptional variety of finishes, coupled with a strong design vision tie the project together and make it stand out amongst its competitors.

Starting at the Foundations

Aegis Mercer Island is built on the site of a 1960s-era assisted living facility, the foundations of which were still present when we broke ground. Normally, removing them would be straightforward. But we were also building into a hillside with unstable soil and a history of landslides. The problem became twofold: how to remove the old foundations and build new ones without triggering another slide?

To solve it, we left the existing foundations alone while installing shoring piles that were much larger than usual to offset pressure from the hill. That gave us room to start removing and replacing foundations — but this effort was further complicated by the rainy Fall weather turning the job site into knee-high mud.

Compass In Control

Mercer Island is the fifth project Compass has completed with Aegis Living and the culmination of many lessons learned. 

Unlike market rate apartments, the critical path runs through the complicated main floor amenities and finishes. Debugging this area early, including starting the commercial kitchen as soon as possible were keys to finishing the project early. 

There’s no single way Compass likes to work.  We take pride in leveraging our lessons learned and getting better on every project. Our collaborative partnerships with clients take whatever form the project needs. But we’re proud of Mercer Island because it shows what can happen when our teams strive to make every project better than the last.