 You can hear the enthusiasm in David Bowles’ voice as he talks about his plans for this spring and summer.
Bowles, the new owner of the Louis Rose Place office building in University Research Park, plans to turn the 23-year-old structure into Charlotte’s first Platinum-level LEED certified building.
“It screams to be green,” says Bowles, president of Environmental Services of Charlotte, a heating and air-conditioning company now headquartered on Reames Road.
“The way the building is laid out, the engineering couldn’t be a better fit for the solar we are getting ready to put in,” he said. “The boiler room and chillers are external from the building so it has a bare roof. And the building sits east-west,” ideal for getting maximum exposure for the solar panels, he added.
Bowles, who is completing a program on LEED accreditation, plans to house his company’s offices in about a sixth of the 71,000-square-foot, two-story building.
Once renovated, the building will showcase how Environmental Services of Charlotte can help its customers save money and protect the environment.
Bowles expects to lease out the rest of the space to companies like his that serve the building industry and want offices that reflect their concern for the environment.
The building will be designed so everyone who works there can share in appreciating it. “I want everyone in the building to feel like they are a part of it,” Bowles says. “I want to show tenants in real time the amount of energy we are creating with photo-voltaic panels and how much energy the building is using at any given time, so they can pull it up on a computer monitor and say, ‘Wow! We are producing more energy than we are using!’”
IMPRESSIVE BUILDING
Bowles discovered the building’s inner beauty more than a year ago, long before he thought about buying it. Another company had hired Environmental Services to service the office building’s heating and air-conditioning system. Even though the building stood vacant for several years, the owners had continued to keep it heated and cooled, Bowles says, and replaced the roof in 2007.
“So I knew what was in the building and was admiring how it was built and thinking someone would get a neat property,” Bowles related.
Meanwhile, Bowles had begun a quiet search for larger quarters for his own business. Most of the 38 employees now work out of a 5,000-square-foot building at Reames and Old Statesville roads.
Bowles says the Louis Rose Place building literally “fell out of the sky.”
Broker Caren Wingate of Machen-Wingate Advisory Group had gathered several possible buildings for him to review, “and there it was. So I asked her, ‘Is there any way I could afford this one?’ and she said, ‘Let’s put in a bid and see.’”
The Charlotte Observer reported that Environmental Services will spend about $4 million to buy and renovate the building, which sits on about 9.5 acres along I-85. Bowles plans to occupy about 10,000-12,000 square feet of the first floor of the building by late this summer.
He is working with Wingate to lease the remaining space. Beth Machen, also of Machen-Wingate, is overseeing getting the building LEED certified.
The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System is a voluntary program created by the U.S. Green Building Council to encourage sustainable building and development practices.
The program provides certification in several categories, such as core and shell, and commercial interiors, as well as at several levels. Platinum certification is the most demanding.
UNIVERSITY CITY’S GROWING ENERGY ROLE
University City has a central role in both sustainable construction and energy production.
Two major players in nuclear energy have research facilities in University Research Park. EPRI – the Electric Power Research Institute – has its R&D headquarters here. Several hundred people also work at the research park offices of AREVA, an international company servicing the nuclear power industry.
At UNC Charlotte, the Daylighting and Energy Performance Lab, part of the College of Architecture, helps businesses design energy-efficient lighting systems. Among its recent projects are Mecklenburg County’s transformation of the old Freedom Mall into a LEED-certified government services center.
The next building to rise at UNC Charlotte’s Charlotte Research Institute will house the Energy Production and Infrastructure Center, with office, classroom and lab space devoted to energy-infrastructure research and collaboration with energy companies.
Both the EPIC building, expected to open in 2011, and the research institute’s nearly completed Bioinformatics Center are designed to meet LEED certification.
WANT TO KNOW MORE?
• LEED IN CHARLOTTE - Learn more about LEED-certified area buildings at http://chapters.usgbc.org/charlotte.
• LEASING OPPORTUNITIES - Learn more about leasing opportunities in the Louis Rose Place building by contacting Caren Wingate of Machen-Wingate Advisory Group at 704-348-2431.
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