Story at a glance:
- Scout Living, connected to Ponce City Market, brings the comforts of home to flexible stays.
- All units at Scout Living include custom, adjustable furniture and all of your kitchen needs.
- The project largely responds to the needs of multiple generations, according to Jamestown, who developed Scout Living to fill a void.
Stepping into Scout Living feels warm and cozy. A vibrant foyer offers plenty of spots to sit and read, hang out, or simply wait for an Uber, and staff are welcoming—though it’s also easy not to interact if preferred, with app-based check-in and keyless locks (SALTO Systems) to rooms. Stays are flexible—in length, type of accommodation, and service.
The 22-story project is set up to feel like apartment living—even one-bedroom units have a full kitchen with everything you need—but with the flexibility of hotel stays. The new concept is from Jamestown—the real estate firm behind projects like Chelsea Market in New York, Industry City in Brooklyn, Ponce City Market in Atlanta, Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco, and more.
“The Scout Living product really came out of—given the cost of housing in America being so high, particularly in cities—how do we create a really efficient, ESG-forward, furnished apartment community that also can toggle and create efficiencies for people who don’t want a full-time spot or who want the ability to be fluid in what they do?” says Michael Phillips, president of Jamestown.
How do we create a really efficient, ESG-forward, furnished apartment community?
The project offers more than 400 one- and two-bedroom units, many of them with a great view looking out over Ponce City Market or toward downtown Atlanta, plus building amenities like a rooftop pool. “It toggles between a hospitality product of one-plus night stay to an annual product, like a year lease,” Phillips says.
Scout Living’s 405 units are designed to provide a place of respite, featuring a warm and tonal palette. There are 301 one-bedroom units averaging 397 square feet and 104 two-bedroom units averaging 767 square feet, all with 9-foot ceilings. Photo courtesy of Jamestown
Scout Living’s fully furnished living experience is sustainable, too, with thoughtful design details and natural elements throughout, from wood tambour and natural cork flooring to pops of color, art, and timeless decor.
Natural light fills the fully furnished and serviced units, stocked with cooking essentials, a dishwasher, and washer-dryer combo as well as separate living and sleeping spaces. And it’s all steps from Ponce City Market, the Beltline, and the surrounding Old Fourth Ward neighborhood. The building includes 12,000 square feet of retail with 21-foot ceilings on the ground floor, which was set to be occupied by Necessary Purveyor, an all-day restaurant and gourmet market, in spring 2025.
The bedrooms at Scout Living are intentionally small with felt-lined walls to create an intimate, cozy environment. Photo courtesy of Jamestown
The project largely responds to the needs of multiple generations, Phillips says. “The 55- to 65-year-olds are at a point in their careers where they want to be more urban and more centric to amenities and walking and health and wellness, and the 20- to 35 or 40-year-olds want the same, but they want slightly different products in that offering.”
Scout Living is part of Ponce City Market’s second phase, which also includes 619 Ponce—a four-story mass timber loft office building that opened in 2024, and Signal House, a new residential building designed with active amenities. The new development aims to generate greater community connectivity and be a walkable microcosm near the Beltline, with onsite bike and scooter parking, designated rideshare drop-off sites, electric bike and car share programs, and electric car charging stations. All three buildings are targeting net neutral operational carbon, LEEDv4 Core & Shell certification, and Fitwel certification (already achieved by Signal House). The new development is also targeting all-electric operations and efficient building systems to reduce emissions to achieve net zero carbon operations. The 619 Ponce project sources all of its timber locally, within 200 miles, which in and of itself is unique. The technical services team at Georgia-Pacific worked with SmartLam to make it happen. “That’s been a great test bed,” Phillips says.
We define the buildings that we build, and then they define us for the rest of our lives.
With European roots, Jamestown’s sustainability department dates back to 2007 and builds upon a continued mission to understand energy consumption in terms of environmental impact as well as from an investor appetite standpoint, Phillips says, in terms of giving buildings the best chance to win in the future from a tenancy and capital market standpoint. “At 619 and at Scout and at Signal House we really leaned into the most compliant ESG mechanisms we could—whether it’s the way we dealt with sound attenuation in 619 or recycled material quotients in our interiors at Scout, as well as energy consumption management systems,” Phillips says. “We have a digital twinning process on our building so we can monitor all our systems in a real-time way, which I think has been very helpful.”
The lobby at Scout Living is in stark contrast to corporate hospitality offerings, with a clean, classic design lined with open ash shelves and National Geographic magazines. Photo courtesy of Jamestown
Jamestown continues to lean into innovation and work with like-minded sustainable partners when it comes to material selection and connecting people and places. “I think all these things ladder up to a similar thing, whether it’s about health and wellness or nutrition or food security or impact programs and lifting up communities,” Phillps says. He turns to a famous Winston Churchill quote—“We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.”
“We define the buildings that we build, and then they define us for the rest of our lives,” Phillips says. “I thought that was really an interesting way to frame it. We don’t realize that our built environment does define us in some way. And later we take it for granted, but the spaces we inhabit, the spaces we work in, the places our children are educated in, they all are the things that define who we become in our lives. And so being intentional about those choices is really important to us.”
Scout Living offers more than 400 one- and two-bedroom units, many of them with a great view looking out over Ponce City Market or toward downtown Atlanta, plus building amenities like a rooftop pool and warm, inviting places to hang out. Photo courtesy of Jamestown
