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The setting of the Stadium Fred Meyer store, in Northwest Portland near Jeld-Wen Field, drove many aspects of a $27 million expansion.

“It’s really designed as an urban building,” said Terry Krause, an associate principal with Portland-based Mackenzie. “It’s not just a big box.”

When Krause four years ago started working on plans for a 50,000-square-foot expansion to the 65,000-square-foot Fred Meyer on Northwest 20th Place, off of West Burnside Street, it looked like many of the retailer’s stores, he said. The design changed significantly after city officials and neighboring residents offered feedback, he said.

“They honestly didn’t like the design originally and said it needed to be more urban, more contextual,” he said. “Our original design was more of a one-story suburban approach, and it evolved over time.”

Final plans for the expansion, which is under construction, take into account the community input, Krause said. As a result, the design is outside the norm for Fred Meyer, he said. The expanded store will have four stories, making it one of the retailer’s tallest, he said. It will have more windows than a typical store, a community room and a one-acre green roof – the retailer’s largest, he added.

Careful design considerations also take into the account the historic context of the 74-year-old store, and the numerous customers who travel there via foot, bike or bus, he said.

“That’s part of why it took so long (to design): There was a lot of thought put into it,” Krause said. “The biggest challenge is taking all those competing aspects and trying to make it all work.”

Crews from R&O Construction of Ogden, Utah, started work on the expansion in October. The project is slated to wrap up by late September 2014, Fred Meyer spokeswoman Melinda Merrill said.

The Stadium Fred Meyer will expand into space formerly occupied by a Hollywood Video store on Burnside Street. The extra space will allow the retailer to increase its selection of wares from groceries to include clothing and hardware, Merrill said. This will make it more like larger Fred Meyer stores, she said.

“It’s a huge opportunity for us to serve that neighborhood,” Merrill said. “It’s going to look a lot more like a Fred Meyer.”

The design team drew inspiration for the expansion from historic photos of buildings along Burnside Street, Krause said. Many of these historic buildings had arcades (covered walkways along the sidewalk); the new Stadium Fred Meyer will include this feature, he said.

“It gives it some transition,” Krause said. “It’s not just a building line to the sidewalk. We just started looking at the historical context. We can design a modern building that has those features. There’s historical context, but there’s also modern precedence for the same thing. It makes a nice pedestrian environment.”

Mackenzie staffers and Fred Meyer officials hosted eight public meetings to gather input from neighbors, he said.

“There was a lot of outreach to really define how this building functioned, how people interact with it,” he said.

Because the store is mostly surrounded by residential areas, the Mackenzie design team also had to consider minimizing the sound made by equipment for departments like the deli and bakery, Krause said.

“One of the big challenges we had was the (city) noise ordinance,” he said. “We had to take what we normally do and re-engineer it. The controls of the building will not allow it to have multiple pieces of equipment on that will exceed the noise ordinance.”

The final design for the expansion was worth the effort, Krause said.

“It’s quite an investment of time and money for Fred Meyer,” he said. “They’re getting more and more savvy to designing to the neighborhood.”