Karen Koehler

Attorney. Investor. Preservationist. Seattle Storyteller.

Karen Koehler has spent her career fighting for people, challenging convention, and refusing to walk away from something simply because the path forward is difficult.

For more than four decades, that determination has defined her life as an attorney. Today, it also defines a very different pursuit: preserving the buildings, architecture, and history that make Seattle special.

Karen knew she wanted to become a lawyer when she was just 13 years old. She went on to earn her law degree from Seattle University in 1985 and built an extraordinary career as a trial attorney. Now Senior Managing Partner at Stritmatter Law, Karen has handled complex, high-profile cases throughout Washington and earned recognition as one of the state's leading trial lawyers.

But somewhere along the way, Karen began building something else.

What started with real estate investment gradually became a second career—and eventually, a passion all its own.

Over the years, Karen has assembled a diverse portfolio of real estate investments, developing a hands-on understanding of what it means to own, operate, improve, renovate, and protect properties for the long term. Yet it is Seattle's older buildings that have captured her imagination most.

Karen believes an old building is more than its square footage or development potential. It is craftsmanship that may never be replicated. It is the story of the people who designed it, built it, lived in it, and shaped the neighborhood around it. And once a piece of that history disappears, it rarely comes back.

That belief has increasingly shaped her approach to real estate.

Rather than seeing an aging property and asking, What could replace this? Karen is far more interested in asking, What could this become again?

Her projects combine investment with stewardship—taking buildings that have been neglected, altered, or simply allowed to age and finding a way to make them relevant for another generation without erasing the character that made them worth saving in the first place.

The work isn't always easy. Historic properties come with surprises. Renovations become complicated. Budgets change. Old systems reveal themselves behind even older walls. And preserving a building often requires considerably more patience than tearing one down and starting over.

Karen wouldn't have it any other way.

In many respects, her two careers aren't as different as they first appear. Both require curiosity, persistence, problem-solving, an appetite for complicated projects, and a willingness to fight for something worth protecting.

The courtroom may have been Karen's first arena.

Seattle's old buildings have become her second.