About YS Development

YS Development is a small development company building modern, green houses in the Eastside area outside of Seattle (Bellevue, Kirkland, Redmond). Their website includes a nice page on green building. They handle the entire project from beginning to end — land acquisition, design, permitting and building. Not everything is done directly by them; they work with architects for the design, and of course the building phase uses various contractors. But they work to provide a custom-built house at a fixed price point, which is very appealing to us. We love the idea of a custom-built home; but everyone we know who has worked on a custom building has run into problems, cost overruns, financing issues, etc. YS Development should be able to help us with a lot of these issues; for example, they're dealing with all the permitting and details to get the property workable for the Taltree development.

Kirkland Duo

One of the showcase developments from YS Development is Kirkland Duo, which is two high-end homes near downtown Kirkland. These are both built for speculation (meaning there was no customer at development time — this is what most new homes are built as), but the finishes, layout, and overall design are good examples of the work YS Development does. They are fairly large (around 3600-3800 sq. ft.) and are well out of our price range; but we were impressed with the amount of care and detail put into these compared to most new homes we saw. Even before we met Yuval, the head of YS Development, and went on a house tour with him, we realized that he had really studied and implemented design at a level most spec houses don't have. For example, windows seemed to be designed to frame views appropriately. Windows were placed to avoid staring directly at neighboring houses. Windows were also used as a design element; instead of just sticking them around haphazardly, they were placed so as to benefit both the internal and external architecture. The homes have a lot of green features, such as a garage separated by a short walk-way to separate it from the house; a green roof in some areas; natural wool carpet; low-VOC paint; etc. One of the houses has sold already, but the other is doing regular open houses (check the YS Development home page for the schedule). If you are in the area, we recommend checking it out.

Current Projects

Currently, there are a couple community projects YS Development is working on. One of them is ours, Taltree ecoVillage, which is still early in the process. The other project is in Bellevue, and is further along. They are doing five single-family homes, each with their own garage and lot, which gives them a bit more flexibility in design, but may not provide the same kind of community areas as Taltree will have. The houses are also a bit larger and more expensive in comparison. For this project, they were working on submitting plans to the city for two of the houses about a month ago, so they are at least several months ahead of us.

YS Development also does one-off custom homes for individual customers, which includes finding the right site, custom design, and building. They work with the customer to provide this within the desired budget. This is a good alternative for those who aren't interested in one of the community projects, or have a different locaton and/or price they would like.