BOTHELL — So it takes a certain amount of mischievousness to make a principal’s office into a bar.
That’s what brothers Mike and Brian McMenamin did in their newest project.
They rebuilt the Historic Anderson School in downtown Bothell into a hotel with bars and restaurants hidden around the campus. The project, which opened Thursday, also includes a brewery, a 134-seat movie theater and a 112-foot-long saltwater pool.
The Principal’s Office was where Karen McDonald was headed Thursday afternoon. The Woodinville woman attended the brick Art Deco-style junior high school in the late 1960s.
“I can’t wait to have a glass of wine in the Principal’s Office,” McDonald said. “Don’t quote me, but I did spend some time there as a child for other reasons.”
The McMenamin brothers have a successful formula taking older, sometimes decrepit buildings and transforming them with a little bit of history, a lot of art and even more beer into a place that attracts people from all over the country.
The Historic Anderson School project at 18607 Bothell Way NE, Bothell is the newest project for their company, which is based in Portland, Oregon. The project cost $26 million and is the first McMenamins hotel in the Puget Sound area.
On opening day, scores of people wandered through the halls, taking a look at the art, reading stories of local people gathered by McMenamins historian Tim Hills and sampling the beer and wine and food.
Ed Yusen lives in Bothell, five minutes away from Anderson School. He dropped by after work and came away impressed.
“I thought I’d just stop in for five minutes to check it out,” Yusen said. “I’ve been here an hour.”
Barbara Ruiz, of Duvall, had an inkling that her daughter, Tracie Ruiz, would be featured in a painting at the McMenamins. Her daughter won a gold medal in synchronized swimming in the 1984 Olympics.
Walking with friends through the buildings, Ruiz found two paintings of her daughter as well as pictures of her daughter and her husband, Del Ruiz, and father, Bruce Heale.
“I had no idea they had this number of pictures,” Barbara Ruiz said.
Even the people who had a hand in the school’s transformation came away impressed.
At a preview party earlier this week, the campus was packed with construction crews and artists and their families as well as some Bothell residents and other invitees.
Subcontractor Andrew Warren, of Portland, and Ted Stapleton, who owns The Floor Store, also in Portland, pointed out parts of the project they were involved in.
“This is the most over-the-top one they’ve done,” Stapleton said of the McMenamins. “It’s just amazing.”
“They’re all amazing,” Warren said. “They just get more eccentric each time.”
With this project, the McMenamins promise that guests can “sleep in class and drink in woodshop.” That’s why they turned the classrooms into hotel rooms and made the original woodworking shop into a pub. And a cozy cabin with — what else — another bar has been added to the courtyard.
The biggest transformation is probably the former swimming pool, which has been re-imagined as a South Seas-inspired tropical saltwater pool surrounded by bamboo paneling. The 3- to 5-foot-deep pool is open to the public for a fee and available to overnight hotel guests and Bothell residents at no charge.
Built above the pool is the North Shore Lagoon Bar with Tiki characters and tropical drinks with 80 varieties of rum.
For Karen McDonald, who attended Anderson when it was a junior high school, it was almost like a reunion. She found pictures of people she knew, including a story about her driver’s education teacher, who was described as having “nerves of steel or no sense.”
“It’s kind of overwhelming,” she said. “I walked in here and I almost burst into tears.”
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