The Next Level in Sustainability: Nature Restoration

When the online travel giant Expedia Group unveiled its $900 million Seattle headquarters in 2019, the 40-acre waterfront campus showcased numerous amenities: a bike path, a soccer field and a beach strewn with driftwood logs for sitting amid the sounds of surf.

It also has some well-curated dirt.

Landscape architects from Surfacedesign in San Francisco focused on extensive natural habitat restoration for the project, a former industrial site that at one point was two piers in Elliott Bay filled in with garbage. That meant meters-deep soil replacement to ease the seeding of native plants, grasses and a coastal meadow.

The overhaul required months of work, a soil scientist to help create a microbiome and nine separate soil profiles, and the use of “compost tea blends,” a kind of organic liquid fertilizer that restores nutrients in the soil without chemical fertilizers.