Historic Emotions
When Jack McLaurin, principal architect with the Lessard Group in Vienna, Va., first saw the Bryan School, it was pretty awful: Pigeons, not people, lived on the top floor.
But people quickly got involved in the Bryan School project. On Capitol Hill, where the school was located, residents were quite vocal about what they wanted done with the blighted school: Save the building. The question was, should its use be commercial, residential, or a combination?
Enter the Lessard Group, which handled the multiyear zoning process, including the public outreach to this unique neighborhood. “This part of the city is historically significant,” McLaurin notes. “There are many lifelong residents who had strong feelings on what should be done with the building. It’s important in a place like this to show that you aren’t going to do something cookie-cutter, but that you are doing something just for them.”
McLaurin has an equally unique method of building community support. “Get the people emotionally brought into the job, to emotionally accept the design and the positive impact on the community.” How? “Share very defined designs and elevations early in the process. Does this before you bring out site plans.” The point is to show people the bigger picture, the high quality of the possibilities first, then get to the details.
Going to this much effort upfront represents a big investment at the very start of a project. But according to McLaurin, “It’s the only way to go. People loved what they saw.” Perhaps that’s not so surprising, though, given the architects’ sensitivity to the school’s special surroundings. From the start, McLaurin and his team made it clear that historical elements of the building would be kept intact. “With the pictures, we showed that the original urban fabric would continue into the new construction.”
School With a View
On top of Seattle’s Queen Anne Hill, with a panoramic view of the city’s skyline and the landmark Space Needle, Queen Anne Apartments offers residents spectacular sights and scenes daily through its enormous windows–a vestige from its school days.
Old schools “tend to have architectural features that are impossible to replicate in new construction,” says Laura Bachman, an associate with Lorig Associates, the Seattle development firm that renovated the Queen Anne School into apartments. That’s true for more than windows. “The walls are solid brick between the classrooms, so there’s great noise protection too,” she says.
Like other school-to-residential renovations, the Queen Anne project team made the most of every opportunity at the building. Bathroom partitions made of real marble were cleaned and chopped up into kitchen counters. Original blackboards stayed on the walls in living rooms. “Being able to creatively use the unique architectural features that come with a school is critical to the success of the project and can be a very effective marketing tool,” Bachman believes.
Bachman, whose firm has turned four Pacific Northwest schools into apartment buildings, has some advice for those who want to return to the classroom as a real estate developer or owner. “Depending on the age of the school, you can encounter much higher-than-average maintenance costs and costs of renovation,” she cautions. “You don’t know what you’re going to have until you start opening up walls.”
But such projects are worth doing, she says. “People like living in cool places with high ceilings,” Bachman observes. “Queen Anne Apartments and all the other places we’ve done have high ceilings and are unique.” So is the property’s performance. Today, the Queen Anne Apartments boasts a vacancy rate of less than 1.5 percent.