SB & Associates

Management: Jay Rood, president
Specialty: Landscape architecture
Year founded: 1994
Current projects: Long-term on-call contracts with WSDOT, King County Library System, and Washington state community colleges; University of Washington’s Sylvan Grove; Des Moines Memorial Drive

SB & Associates recently moved from Queen Anne to bigger digs across the Seattle Ship Canal in Ballard. Despite lean economic times, the 11-person landscape architecture firm anticipates adding more staff in the next month.

Photo courtesy of SB & Associates The Port of Seattle’s new public access park at Terminal 18 on Harbor Island was designed by SB & Associates. SB also designed the new entryway to T-18 and revised the plantings along the Spokane Street corridor.

“Not to say that (the economy) hasn’t had some effect, but we’re a firm that 90 percent of our work is public,” said President Jay Rood. “We really do everything of a public nature — from roadway projects to parks and schools. We have a diversity that’s allowed us to carry through the various vagaries of (public agencies’) budgets. ...We’ve been lucky.”

A big part of the firm’s work involves rehabilitating heritage, culturally significant and other mature landscapes. “The West is becoming of age, we now have mature landscapes that have been in place 30 to 90 years in some places,” Rood said. The firm has rehabilitated historic landscapes around Fort Lewis, the state Capitol in Olympia and the 1892 Jefferson County courthouse in Port Townsend.

SB & Associates is working on a corridor management plan for the Des Moines Memorial Drive, a 10-mile-long World War I memorial. Disease killed off the 1,200 elm trees that once lined the drive. Rood said the plan is to replace the elms, provide some memorial markers and lighting, and use the memorial as a social, neighborhood centerpiece to help reinvigorate the communities it runs through.

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