12/09/2025
Portland, Oregon’s Alberta Arts District includes many galleries, restaurants, and shops. Still, until recently, the neighborhood—about four miles northeast of downtown—had no hotels, let alone one like Cascada, with its biophilic-centric interiors and an emphasis on health in seemingly every detail.
The lobby’s custom sofas were crafted with Portuguese cork; walls finished with natural limestone plaster; and its front desk faces a two-story living wall. The double-height pool room’s triple-pane glass ceiling is embedded with photovoltaic cells. Hundreds of plants—irrigated with rainwater from a 10,000-gallon cistern—were chosen to purify the air. The building’s mass-plywood framing further reduces the project’s carbon footprint.
“Every project we’ve done has been built with a LEED Platinum baseline, and this will be LEED Platinum as well, but we’ve also done a bunch of other sustainable designations—2030 Challenge, Passive House. Each time we geek out on a different construction methodology, we learn a lot,” says Danya Feltzin, executive vice president of Solterra, the project’s developer and general contractor. “Now the company has evolved from designing sustainable spaces to this project, where the most sustainable aspect is the health-and-wellness focus.”
Designed by LEVER Architecture for developer-builder Solterra, the Cascada Hotel and Spa embraces low-carbon, health-centric luxury.
