Kelly Station

Kelly Station is a five-story, 76-unit affordable housing development at 2462 E. Washington Avenue in Madison on a corner long occupied by the original Kelly Station, a muffler shop and auto sales building that gave the project its name. The design honors that history without being precious about it, drawing on the clean lines and nostalgic warmth of classic American service station architecture and translating them into a contemporary facade of street-level masonry and upper-floor composite siding in a carefully considered palette of complementary tones. A chamfered corner entry and recessed balconies give the building a confident and well-articulated presence at the intersection of East Washington Avenue and N. 7th Street, engaging the pedestrian sidewalk and the steady flow of inbound commuters with equal care.

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Ground-floor units along East Washington are raised slightly above the sidewalk and fitted with direct-entry porches, giving those residents a genuine sense of place and privacy without retreating from the life of the street. The fifth-floor steps back from the building’s primary mass to ease the transition toward the single-family neighborhood to the north, and parking is tucked entirely within the building footprint with access only from 7th Street, freeing the East Washington frontage for landscaping and a more generous pedestrian edge.

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Kelly Station is designed to achieve Wisconsin Green Built Homes certification, with a rooftop solar array, a blue roof stormwater system, and low-maintenance exterior materials built for the long haul. A second-floor roof plaza, a fifth-floor club room with a rooftop deck, and an on-site B-Cycle station round out a building that takes its role in the East Washington corridor seriously, as a place to live well, and as a genuine contributor to the neighborhood around it.