Top Pot Doughnuts

Top Pot Doughnuts
Preserving Neighborhood Character Award

Locations: Downtown, Wedgwood, Queen Anne, Capitol Hill
Partners: Michael and Mark Klebeck and Joel Radin

Top Pot Doughnuts’ Capitol Hill store / Photo: Top Pot Doughnuts

Founded in 2002, Top Pot Doughnuts has made a name for itself with its addicting hand-forged doughnuts. With the company’s beginnings in a modest brick storefront on Capitol Hill, Top Pot has grown to four locations in Seattle and one in Bellevue. Its Downtown, Wedgwood, Queen Anne, and Capitol Hill cafes have become social hubs for each neighborhood. The Capitol Hill and Queen Anne cafes are in one-story, commercial vernacular, brick-clad buildings constructed in 1920 and 1913, respectively. Top Pot’s renovation of these spaces with its signature retro-modern aesthetic continues the tradition of serving the neighborhood. Top Pot also has great appreciation for mid-century modern resources as evidenced by Top Pot’s adaptive reuse of two buildings erected in 1950. The Downtown café, with its dramatic, slanted, front facade of full height windows, is in a building originally occupied by the Hunley Engineering Company. The Wedgwood café is in a former garage/auto repair building.

With backgrounds as general contractors, Michael and Mark design and build Top Pot’s interior spaces themselves. As described on its website, “With no cookie-cutter design templates, each of our locations is individually designed to complement the existing structure and historical elements of the building. That said, certain iconic elements connect all of our cafés, such as custom-made bookshelves and doughnut cases as well as our retro Top Pot brand touches.”

Top Pot was awarded the 2009 Preserving Neighborhood Character award for their commitment to preserving and adaptively reusing modest existing buildings as centers of neighborhood social and economic activity.