The Portland Design Commission approved a plan by Peter Meijer Architect for alterations to the Studio Building and Guild Theatre at 901-919 S.W. Taylor St. with four votes in favor, one against and one abstention. The planned alterations include replacing 192 windows in the Studio Building, installing a new rooftop ventilation system and renovating the Guild Theatre so that it becomes compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The meeting took a somewhat rare turn when city staffers recommended approving alterations different than the preferred plan proposed by designers. The staff report’s top recommendation involved rehabilitating the existing steel windows in the Studio Building rather than replacing them with aluminum windows, as proposed.

“Restoration of the windows was never really on the table,” said Kristen Minor, an associate and preservation planner with Peter Meijer Architect.

The project designers said that the windows’ conditions combined with their age and issues tied to lead paint and asbestos would make any rehabilitation difficult. Also, reaching energy efficiency standards was impossible with the current windows.

“The existing steel windows are not in great condition,” said Halla Hoffer, an associate and project manager with Peter Meijer Architect. “They have lead paint and are leaking for a variety of reasons.”

Despite those concerns, some commissioners were not sold on the idea that the old windows had to go.

“The level of stewardship is in question with this window replacement,” said Commission Chairman David Wark, who cast the lone “no” vote. “It’s a significant building. We want to be careful and thoughtful with the process here.”

Wark also expressed concern that the chosen replacement windows could need to be replaced sooner than the current windows if they were rehabilitated.

“How many times will these be cycled out,” he asked. “It’s tough to support wholesale replacement.”

Wark believes that even if the existing windows couldn’t meet energy efficiency standards, then other alterations such as insulation could compensate adequately. In the end, however, most commissioners supported replacing the windows. The cost to replace them with steel windows ranged from $1.4 million to $2.7 million, so designers looked at other options and eventually chose an aluminum one.

Most commissioners said they believe that replacing the windows could be accomplished without damaging the building’s historic character.

“The building should be on the (National) Register (of Historic Places),” Commissioner Julie Livingston said. “Replacement of the windows seems reasonable.”

That led to the next sticking point: the tint of the windows. Most of the commissioners said they believe that the glass proposed would be far too dark for the building. A condition for the approval was that the glass be changed to a clearer tint.

As for the Guild Theatre, the Design Commission barely took issue with proposed renovations. They are temporary in nature, until a new tenant moves in.

Vanessa Sturgeon, president and CEO of TMT Development, the owner and manager of the building, claimed that the incoming tenant, whom she did not identify, would likely bring further alterations before the commission in the near future.

Also on Thursday:

Park Avenue West sign

A team’s bid for a new sign on the 30-story Park Avenue West tower was sent back to the drawing board. While the Design Commission couldn’t approve the proposal by Ambrosini Design, it did indicate that an altered version could pass muster.

The original plan called for a 92-foot sign for Stoel Rives to be placed on the east facade of the illuminated lantern feature. The commission preferred an alternative: installation under the lantern feature.

The design team plans to bring altered plans before the commission on April 20.

525 N.E. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.

A proposed six-story building was approved by the Design Commission. The building, designed by Hacker, will stand 85 feet tall, and include five floors of offices, ground-floor retail space and 65 underground parking stalls.

Developer PMC LLC., a joint venture between Beam Development and Urban Development + Partners, will begin the permitting process in May. The schedule calls for construction to begin in November and finish in approximately one year.

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A young downtown Portland tower is hitching its retail presence to a familiar Oregon brand.

TMT Development has signed Pendleton Woolen Mills, a popular maker of blankets and other goods, as a tenant in Park Avenue West, the firm announced Monday.

Pendleton Woolen Mills is taking 3,191 square feet on the ground floor facing Director Park. The space will gain tenant improvements beginning this month, and the store is scheduled to open in mid-June.

The deal represents a major step forward for Park Avenue West, which was completed in 2016. Construction of the 30-story mixed-use tower began in 2007, but stalled in 2009 during the Great Recession; it resumed in 2013.

Portland law firm Stoel Rives earlier this year moved into the building, and now occupies 131,905 square feet of office space. The tower’s 202 residential units, totaling 173,648 square feet, are fully leased. The building also has six stories of underground parking.

Park Avenue West is located in the heart of downtown on a small block bordered by Morrison and Yamhill streets and Ninth and 10th avenues.

The store will be a flagship location for Pendleton Woolen Mills. In a news release, its president, Mort Bishop, said the company looks forward to showcasing the brand “in a new, fresh and upscale environment.”

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Editor’s note: To see more photos of Stoel Rives’ new office, click here.

Stoel Rives gets top billing at Park Avenue West.

Portland’s largest law firm occupies the top nine floors of the downtown mixed-use tower that was developed by TMT Development, designed by TVA Architects and built by Hoffman Construction.

Stoel Rives’ business development manager, Jackie McClue, earlier this week led a tour of the firm’s new space.

Originally, condominiums were planned for Park Avenue West’s top floors. But the design was flipped during development, and the condos were placed below the law offices.

The offices are smaller than Stoel Rives’ former offices at the Standard Insurance Center, at 900 S.W. Fifth Ave. Stoel Rives is using only about 121,000 square feet, down from more than 140,000 square feet at the Standard Insurance Center. (The firm is subleasing a portion of one floor, amounting to 10,000 square feet, to another user.)

“People are really more focused on the quality of the space than the size of their new offices versus their old offices,” said Wally Van Valkenburg, managing partner of Stoel Rives’ Portland office. “We wanted to make more efficient use of our space.”

Stoel Rives may be leasing less space, but it’s paying more per square foot. The firm signed a 15½-year lease at Park Avenue West.

In another change, the offices for Stoel Rives partners and associates are more comparably sized than they were in the Standard Insurance Center. Stoel Rives has 126 attorneys and 209 staff members working in Park Avenue West, at 760 S.W. Ninth Ave. The firm has offices in 10 other cities.

Park Avenue West is poised to soon receive a Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design platinum rating. The building uses 425 gallons of rainwater a day for non-potable uses such as flushing toilets.

The interior reflects Northwest motifs in its use of Oregon white oak flooring and Douglas fir paneling and doors. ZGF Architects designed Stoel Rives’ tenant improvements.

The space is clearly a law office, not a tech startup. There are no arcade games, ping-pong tables or beanbag chairs as one might see in some of Portland’s creative office spaces.

Stoel Rives does have collaborative spaces featuring high-backed couches and tables where lawyers gather to practice trial arguments. Lawyers adorn their offices with everything from hunting trophies – Eugene A. Frassetto, a partner, has a bust of a six-point elk he bagged in Malheur County – to Trail Blazers memorabilia.

Two of the firm’s floors in Park Avenue West hold conference space.

Stoel Rives downsized its library for the move. The firm unloaded 85 percent of its bound volumes, which were donated to prisons and county libraries or recycled.

“What remains is primarily resources that aren’t easily accessible online, don’t work well online or have some connection to the history of Stoel Rives,” said Shannon Marich, knowledge and research services manager.

The firm set aside wellness rooms for new mothers on the 25th and 28th floors.

Stoel Rives moved during Memorial Day weekend, and reopened May 31. The firm also used the opportunity to rebrand with a fresh logo.

The views provided by several outdoor terraces range from the St. Johns Bridge to Mount Hood and Mount St. Helens. The West Hills loom close by, while all of downtown Portland stretches out below.

Stoel Rives asked the architects to include covered outdoor spaces.

Mark Houk, Stoel Rives’ business development technology manager, said he enjoys stepping outside.

“I just get away when I need to step away from the computer,” he said. “I’ve never seen Portland from this vantage before.”

The move was only Stoel Rives’ fourth in its history. The firm was founded in 1907 in Portland.

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Stoel Rives, Portland’s largest law firm, has moved into a new nine-floor office at Park Avenue West. The 121,000-square-foot tenant improvement was designed by ZGF Architects and built by Lease Crutcher Lewis.

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TMT Development’s Park Avenue West tower is now open for residential leasing as tenant improvements are under way on the office portion of the 30-story tower. The building features 202 studio, one- and two-bedroom apartment units, and residential amenities including indoor and outdoor gathering spaces and a fitness center. Twenty of the building’s apartments, which range in monthly rent from $2,156 to $4,525, have already been leased.

General contractor Hoffman Construction reached substantial completion on the TVA Architects-designed project last month. Meanwhile, tenant improvement work on the office portion of the building is ongoing, including a ZGF Architects-designed buildout by Lease Crutcher Lewis for anchor tenant Stoel Rives, which is occupying the building’s top nine stories. Other office include Morgan Stanley, Washington Trust Bank, Endeavor Capital, and the Oregon Angel Fund, while Charles Schwab has leased ground-floor retail space.

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Take a look at the project teams for the most visible – and successful – projects completed recently in both the Portland-metro area and Oregon, and there’s a good chance Lease Crutcher Lewis will be listed as general contractor on more than a few of them.

The 130-year-old company is involved in some of the most newsworthy projects in the metro area, from the 290,000-square-foot Wizer Block development in Lake Oswego to a nine-floor tenant improvement at Park Avenue West for law firm Stoel Rives.

The secrets to the company’s longevity and success lie in no small part to a willingness to keep an eye out for the next big trend in the industry and embrace innovation.

“We’re always trying to come up with a better mousetrap,” Bart Ricketts, the company’s CEO, said.

When Bill Lewis, the great-grandson of company founder N.T. Lease, was preparing to retire, he and the other leads of the firm knew they didn’t want to sell the firm to an outside owner. Instead, the decision was made to shift the company to an employee-ownership model.

The firm also took a path into uncharted territory when it signed on to build the University of Oregon‘s Lillis Business Complex at the University of Oregon in the early 2000s. The project became the university’s first LEED-rated building. At the time work started, however, that distinction didn’t mean a whole lot. Sustainability was still a word that few people were acquainted with, and Lease Crutcher Lewis found itself taking a crash course in green building.

“It’s all run of the mill now, but none of that was going on then,” Ricketts said.

These days, with sustainability firmly under its belt, Lease Crutcher Lewis is looking to push the envelope in other areas of construction. A couple of years ago, the company worked on the Allison Spa and Inn in Newberg, and was able to marry its commercial project efficiency with a residential approach.

More recently, the general contractor wrapped up work on the Oregon Zoo’s Elephant Lands. While the firm had worked on veterinary facilities for universities in the past, the zoo project was a different animal altogether.

“It was our first chance to delight animals and the community,” Ricketts said. “It was a great project, and fun for our team.”

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Interface Engineering can trace its roots back to 1969, when several firms in the suburban city of Milwaukie joined forces. The resulting company thrived for years, creating a name for itself in the region and attracting talented individuals like Rob Matteson and Andy Frichtl.

When it came time for the founders to retire, they decided to pass ownership to some of their longtime employees. Matteson and Frichtl bought out the founders and proceeded to bring changes to the firm to mesh with their personalities and the changing times.

“Shortly after, we moved to downtown Portland because that’s where most of our clients are,” said Frichtl, now a managing principal.

As a green movement began slowly building on projects here and there in Portland, Interface’s leaders took notice. The firm’s decision to invest time and money in learning about sustainability and offering it as a service to clients was driven not just by what was shaping up to be a new trend in design and construction.

“We started targeting sustainable projects because that’s what we were most passionate about,” Frichtl said.

That passion led to Interface becoming involved with the transformation of an old Portland ice house building into the Ecotrust Building, the first in the country to earn a gold rating in the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program.

Since then, Interface has grown to 200 employees and five offices, and is sought out around the globe for its expertise in sustainability and innovation on a range of project types.

“Sustainability has kind of carried us everywhere,” Frichtl said.

At its Hawaii office, for example, Interface is working with the University of Hawaii to come up with new net-zero water and waste standards for university projects. Closer to home, the firm’s work can be seen in TMT Development‘s new Park Avenue West, both in the overall tower and in the area of tenant improvements.

Interface also has brought sustainability to other parts of the world through its work on U.S. Embassy buildings.

“They’re really interesting projects, very technical, but sustainability is a big thing for the (U.S. Department of State),” Frichtl said.

“We have our eye on a lot of different regions we want to move into,” he added. “We’re looking at anything sustainable.”

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Tenants are beginning to sign up for prime space at Park Avenue West, and the early occupants draw heavily from the financial industry.

Charles Schwab appears to be the building’s ground-floor tenant along Southwest Morrison Street. The space has Charles Schwab signs up, and the financial firm has requested a building permit for tenant improvements at that address.

Other likely tenants include Stoel Rives (Portland’s largest law firm), Endeavor Capital, Morgan Stanley, Trust Bank and the Oregon Angel Fund. Each has filed for building permits with the Portland Bureau of Development Services.

Commercial Realty Advisors Northwest agents representing the building did not return phone calls and email messages Thursday seeking comment.

At this stage, there is no sign that Park Avenue West has pulled in a big-name retailer. That runs headlong into the mixed-use philosophy, which holds that retailers, restaurants and other tenants that bring in foot traffic are to be preferred.

“Everybody likes to have retail as much as possible,” said Don Vallaster, an architect who serves on the Portland Design Commission. “That enhances downtown and the other businesses in the downtown, but with the rise of Amazon I guess there’s less local retailers around all the time.”

Vallaster added, “It’s a pretty prominent location by (Nordstrom). I would think they’d be able to find someone. I hope they do.”

Park Avenue West, at 30 stories, is now one of Portland’s most prominent buildings. It stands 502 feet tall to rank No. 4 in the city. It also occupies an entire downtown block bordered by Southwest Ninth and Park avenues, and Morrison and Yamhill streets.

The building was developed by TMT Development and designed by TVA Architects.

Plans for the building envisioned two floors of retail, 15 floors of apartments and 13 floors of offices. Studio apartments start at $2,156 a month, up to $4,535 for some two-bedroom units, according to the building’s website.

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Nine years ago, Samir Mokashi told his wife, Asawari, that he wanted to leave his architectural job at CH2M Hill and start his own company providing design teams with code analysis. Years earlier, when the couple immigrated to the U.S. from India, Samir owned only a suitcase and a dream and Asawari had $400 to her name.

“Look,” Samir said to his wife, “we built all this together. The worst that can happen to us is that I’ll have a suitcase and a dream, and you’ll have $400, and we’ll build it back again.”

The Mokashis’ company, Beaverton-based Code Unlimited, has since secured work on big projects such as Park Avenue West, the Collaborative Life Sciences Building and Portland State University’s School of Business Administration Building.

“Regulations are not written so that everybody can understand them,” Samir said. “Sometimes there are conflicting regulations and you can’t make sense out of them. There’s interpretations that also happen. What we do is make it simple and walk people through the process.”

Code Unlimited’s work impressed Robert Thompson, a principal at TVA Architects. The design firm worked on the Park Avenue West project.

“Code Unlimited is a fantastic company,” he said. “Those guys are fantastic in assisting us in valid justifications and explaining our interpretation so we can get through the city building departments with legitimate approvals for planning and zoning within the city. They are masters. They have a knowledge of the building codes far beyond most architects.”

Park Avenue West was designed for the top 10 floors to hold condominiums. However, after the project stalled for five years, condos were changed to offices. The problem was that occupancy in an office is much higher than in a condominium, and the constructed stairways were in conflict with fire codes.

“They were stuck between a rock and a hard place,” Samir said. “The city would not approve their plans. They had written 11 appeals and they were all rejected.”

TVA Architects finally brought in Code Unlimited. Samir reduced the problem to one issue: Building codes required three-hour-rated (survival time in a fire) columns. He proposed making the columns four-hour-rated by increasing the fireproofing by an eighth of an inch. He used that as a bargaining chip to keep the stairways as they were.

“It added a lot more safety value to the building that we could trade for other things,” Samir said of the four-hour-rated columns. “We wrote four or five appeals and got it all squared away and got them moving.”

To a certain degree, Code Unlimited is far removed from the limelight. When TMT Development, Park Avenue West’s owner, was asked for comment about Code Unlimited, a spokesperson responded that no one at TMT had ever heard of the company.

“It’s not minutia, (because) it’s important, but there are a lot of things that the owners don’t necessarily need to get involved in,” Thompson said. “That’s really our role to manage that level of detail. They’re a consultant to the architect; they’re not a consultant to the owner. I consider them a part of our design team.”

Long before Park Avenue West, or any other project, Samir and Asawari came to the U.S. to pursue their education. Samir earned his master’s degree in architecture from the University of Oregon and Asawari earned her doctorate in biochemistry and molecular biology from Oregon Health & Science University.

After Samir graduated, he got a job with CH2M Hill. He demonstrated a unique ability to understand code and became the company’s code expert, working in several states and internationally. Eventually, he started his own business.

Later, Asawari became a principal at Code Unlimited, managing its business operations and human resources. She has found the business world as fascinating as the world of science.

“The reason I got into research is because I’m a very curious person,” she said. “When I was doing research, I was asking questions and looking at patterns and there was analysis and math and software involved. I was constantly learning new things. When I became Samir’s partner, I was able to transfer all of my skills into being his business manager. This was a new thing for me. But I’ve enjoyed it.”

Code Unlimited has a diverse client base, mostly in the Pacific Northwest. The company works with both large and small companies with goals ranging from value architecture to avant-garde architecture.

It’s a team effort for the Mokashis.

“Having our own business, we both enjoy,” Samir said. “Working with each other … 80-90 percent of the time we enjoy it.”

He and Asawari both laughed.

“When you’re personal partners and business partners both, the lines get blurred – most of the time for the better,” Samir said. “Sometimes it’s challenging. But the best thing that I find with Asawari coming into it without having the background in this business is she brings a unique perspective and a way of looking at things that I would never even think of.”

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The Park Avenue West tower in downtown Portland continues to take shape, with the project slated for an end-of-year completion date. Curtainwall has been installed up to the 24^th floor of the 30-story building, and crews are busy screening in the mechanical penthouse.

On the building’s 15 residential floors, crews are in various stages of framing, roughing in mechanical, electrical, and plumbing, installing drywall and casework. On the upper residential floors HVAC and fire suppression systems are being installed.

The building will be sealed up by early summer, and the tower crane will be coming down shortly thereafter. Tenant improvement work on the top nine floors for anchor tenant Stoel Rives will also begin this summer.

The project is being built by Hoffman Construction for TMT Development. It was designed by TVA Architects.

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