Architectural Review Board Meeting   6/21/2022

maybe Frank hasn't joined then we'll maybe wait.

So it's one o'clock p.m.

I'm calling the June 21st, 2022 meeting of the Albemarle County Architecture Review Board to order.

This meeting is being held pursuant to and in compliance with ordinance number 20-A-16, an ordinance to ensure the continuity of government

during the COVID-19 disaster.

A quorum is present.

Architecture Review Board members present electronically are Frank Hancock, Dave Van Der Werf, Taro Matsuno, myself, Chris Henningsen,

and we're expecting Frank Stoner.

The opportunities for the public to access and participate in the electronic meeting are posted on Albemarle County website at the Albemarle County calendar.

The public has real time audio visual access to this meeting over Zoom in real time.

Audio Access Over Telephone, both as provided in lawfully posted meeting notice.

This meeting is being recorded and will be made available on the county's website.

This online meeting is a public record and subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.

All speakers, when it is your turn to speak, please first state your name for the record.

Everyone who is participating today, it is good practice to mute your microphone until it is your turn to speak.

Applicants who are making presentations, note that your presentation is limited to a total of 15 minutes, which you can divide among your team members.

Carolyn will let us know when the 15 minutes are up.

Do any ARB members have anything to disclose?

No.

All right.

All right, great.

So there are no consent agenda items today or regular review items.

There are two work sessions today.

The first topic is the county-wide certificate of appropriateness criteria for structures located 750 feet or more from the EC.

The presentation will be made by Margaret Maliszewski.

Yes, I am going to share my screen.

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Looking better.

Yeah, everything just completely froze for a while.

Sorry about that.

But looks like we're back now.

Okay, so for this item, just gonna start with a little bit of background.

And in 2010, our zoning ordinance was revised to allow certain types of entrance quarter applications to be reviewed by staff without a full review by the ARB in a meeting.

And so there are two entrance quarter review types that we have.

One is reviewed by the ARB and the other is the staff level review.

And those staff level reviews

are called countywide certificates of appropriateness.

And they are the types of proposals that are smaller in scale and typically have less visual impact.

And one of the staff level review options is for structures located 750 feet or more from an entrance corridor street.

Each of the countywide certificates has a list of design criteria that

must be met for that particular proposal to be approved.

And among the criteria for structures located 750 feet or more from the entrance quarter is one about color.

And that criteria calls for materials to be in earth tones, and it says that the use of bright white is limited to trim and decorative elements.

There have been some developments in which light or bright shades of white were not approved by the ARB.

And in those cases, at least some of those cases, the buildings were proposed, were described as having minimal visibility and had wooden buffers.

And so it was determined that more muted colors were needed for the buildings to blend with the buffer.

So we're currently reviewing a proposal now for this type of countywide certificate, and white is proposed as a primary wall color, not just for trim.

But these buildings have a different relationship to the street than what I just described.

They're further away, and they aren't being presented as needing to blend with a wooded screen.

So we have that issue and then we also have the issue that these criteria don't define what bright white is.

So we have a few questions for you today.

A few questions have come up.

I'm looking for some direction.

We're wondering if we should be applying this particular criteria in cases like this where the goal isn't necessarily to minimize visibility to buildings.

And then do we want to define what bright white is?

If the answer to that is yes, there are some systems available for that, like reflectance value or the RGB color codes or red, green, and blue color codes.

are two that we often see referenced when we're looking into colors.

And then do we want to update the criteria for this particular review type?

So we appreciate getting your input on that.

I can show you some detail on the particular proposal that we're reviewing at staff level.

So the development that we're looking at is located almost 1,000 feet from the Route 29 entrance corridor.

In this image, you can see 29 at the bottom, sort of the angled street.

And if you can see where the note says 1E Lot 2, that block is the area in question.

This is an image of the proposed site layout.

These are apartment buildings and it's a block in a much larger development.

It's the North Point development.

This image shows the proposed elevations for the apartment buildings.

They have blue and white siding.

The white is arctic white party siding and that's exactly one of the

the colors that was not approved for buildings in the Brookhill development.

And again, like particularly at the Brookhill development, there were buildings, you may recall, there's a big wooded buffer between the street and the development.

And so the,

White, the Arctic White and I'll say like Cobblestone and maybe one or two other of the hardy colors on the lighter side were replaced with more muted tones.

This is a view of the project area from the entrance corridor.

You can see the houses in the distance along the tree line.

Those would be behind the apartment buildings.

And so back to the questions.

Is applying that criteria in this particular case appropriate?

Do we want to define what bright white is to help apply that criterion in the future?

Yeah, okay.

Margaret, is this looking to the west of 29 or the east heading?

The east.

Well, I guess my comment would be there seems to be distance from the corridor, but not really much buffer.

Based on this photo, it looks like you will see the buildings clearly, at least until other buildings are.

I guess, Margaret, since the

I don't recall it coming up for this type of certificate, but I did not go back and try to run through all the instances of this type of certificate.

Well, I appreciate you sharing the example that brought the question to mind.

I think in my mind's eye when you were describing the question initially, I was imagining small agricultural sort of vernacular structures in white and could easily kind of imagine that.

I think for me, I appreciate and agree with Chris's point that there really isn't any kind of screening that's likely to be in place for quite some time.

for these and for me at least the scale and length of the facades and the amount of white supports for me the original requirement to stay with more muted earth tones.

I think it was written this way specifically for instances like this.

That's going to have a big impact on the corridor.

So we're really only looking at one, the facade of one building that is... Yeah, so this entrance quarter is actually up this direction, so it's one- Oh, I see, yeah, so it's that, yep.

And...

So is the question, I guess there's a question of the language.

Is it, I guess to me it's like, is it really the light reflectance value that's the thing?

Or is it somehow clarifying this, I mean, cause under the current language, it does feel to me like the use of bright white isn't, the use of white is not, what they're showing is not just trim and decorative elements, right?

So in a way I feel like

The language does kind of cover this case unless the applicant is arguing that bright white is ambiguous and that this doesn't count.

Or I guess I'm just trying to wrap my head around what the change.

I mean, I think it is a two part question.

Just trying to think through it.

As I was reviewing this in the past, when the ARB has reviewed white as a color and didn't approve the brighter or lighter whites, it was in a very different situation than this.

So that was one aspect of it.

And then the other is what's bright white?

Yeah, I don't know if we removed the word

I don't know.

I'm going to remove the ambiguity about it.

Yeah.

If not, I mean, I do think it would be helpful to have some light reflectance value established that makes it easier for you to just say, like, yes, this is good.

No, this is not good.

It needs to be, you know,

this many percentage points more muted.

I kind of feel like on dates, I'm agreeing with date a little bit that the bright almost

gives it too much specificity and I kind of worry that using a quality like light reflectance value, like I just don't know enough about the range of possible surface treatments that exists to know whether a given, like I would worry about setting a cutoff and then having it imply that values that are just below that but would have roughly the same visual effect would be sort of okay.

and I think that there's something nice about the fuzziness of just calling it white and then giving, and so I guess this is a question for you Margaret and staff in general is would it be a better tool for you to have something just like white to fall back on and use as a way to, you know, given our sort of general understanding of white

Why are we not talking about the blue?

Well, no, I think that's a good point, Frank, and I agree.

I think it is helpful to

Certainly makes staff's job easier if we have a number to go by, and above the number is not good, and below the number is fine, and that makes it quick and easy, but I can also understand that a number of 245 is not good, but 244 is.

Well, and I'm kind of going through the Sherwin-Williams

catalog online and like there are many things in their white range.

Some of them are in the 80s, some of them are in the 70s.

Well, I suspect the builder wants to use a pre-finished hardy.

So there aren't many choices, right?

There's either.

There may be one that's kind of a light gray.

It's the only white white.

I think cobblestone is maybe the next step down.

So there's a, yeah, it looks like the Arctic white is really the only really white color.

Okay, go ahead.

Yeah, I guess I'm maybe the contrarian here.

I don't,

I'm not offended by the blue.

I think the white, unfortunately, as it appears in this drawing, really isn't white.

It is more of a light gray.

The page is white.

So the white white feels like it's maybe not appropriate.

And yet, I understand what they're trying to create, and it kind of has a fresh feel to it.

And I wonder whether, just given how far back,

This is, are we, one, should we consider adding muted blues to the color range?

Just because I think it's, I'm not sure why we exclude it.

And then, two, it's 750 feet off the main corridor.

I don't know, I just have a hard time getting too worked up about it.

Yeah, I agree with that.

Can I ask, how was that list of approved callers arrived at?

in the first place.

And, cause I noticed that it doesn't include red, which, you know, theoretically would preclude a lot of like red, red colors.

If you were gonna apply the strict letter of that list of colors.

And it seems that this comes up a lot too, when we're reviewing buildings that,

come before the board.

It seems like the list of colors is a little bit restrictive and we oftentimes end up giving applicants a pass on colors.

Sure.

When we were working through the criteria for each of these,

Countywide certificate types staff would have drafted the criteria and brought them to the ARB for review.

I don't have a specific memory of this particular one.

We're always talking about earth tones and I just listed the specific colors that came to mind.

I would say red and orange would fall under the clay name for me.

Early on, there's a history of seeing a lot of white in the distance from some of the primary streets in the county, having a lot of white on buildings, making them stand out in the landscape.

My wife sometimes says I'm colorblind, but to me that blue, I think that could be in the gray family, maybe on one end.

But I think this will have an impact.

and I'm kind of a traditionalist.

I think the way it's written, bright white, having bright is important.

In this case, I think that white appears bright.

Yeah, I kind of agree with Dade's original suggestion that if you just took out the word bright, it would actually be more clear, not less clear, in my opinion.

And also, I guess my other thought too is like, for projects that

are asking for a staff level review.

Just in my opinion, they should not expect as much leeway as a project that's going before the board where, you know, after consideration, the board can give somebody a pass on it.

But I think if they're submitting for a staff review, they should be, you know, they have the criteria and they should just be prepared for it to be a no brainer really.

I think probably my preference would be that we'd limit the sort of the darkest black and the whitest white.

Yeah, I think that's a good point, Taro.

No.

And just for quick reference, if light reflectance value re-emerges, it looks like James Hardy's Arctic White

Okay, so is there then a general consensus that we would be interpreting

This criterion, bright white just means white.

What do we mean by non-traditional muted earth tones?

Non-traditional tones or muted earth tones, is that how it's supposed to read?

Interpret that to me, non-traditional colors that are still muted.

I think we can consider getting rid of that because I think it's subject to interpretation.

I think I would support that.

OK.

So if we want to revise this criterion, it would be good to have a motion and a vote.

I guess I'm still struggling with where does white become light gray?

How do we determine?

If you take out bright,

and you look at the Sherwin-Williams, I mean, there's a lot of stuff that you would consider to be an off-white and does that eliminate all the off-white colors as well?

I think we keep right.

So, and I don't know, just searching randomly for bright white, Google comes up with something of 95% LRV, and then searching for off-white, it comes up, Benjamin Moore says it's a 75.

So I don't know that, I'm not, I don't know that there's, you know, something less than a 75, it seems like maybe would be.

So this, and again, I just did a Google search and I thought this one was interesting about LRV.

It runs from a scale of zero to 100.

Zero is assumed to be absolute black, 100 assumed to be perfectly reflective white.

Neither of those things really exist.

Well, you know what might help?

We could

Maybe using Sherwin-Williams or some other standard color palette, we could say maybe define a range of what bright white looks like and define a range of what off-white looks like and off-white being acceptable and bright white not so much.

That would give a range, doesn't limit it to a single thing, still allows for some

That would work.

I think it's current 77 on their literature, so if we said 75 was the floor it would be

And were you able to find the LRVs for the off-white ones too?

I was curious about that.

I think Cobble was all the way down to 55.

I'm looking at a website here where they classify it by range of LRV, but they have off-white at 75 to 80 and bright white as 80 plus.

So reversing it, I guess maybe it was Taro who made the point first of all, or Chris, that the language is written since it precludes it other than as trim effectively precludes the proposal.

And Frank, to your point about that, if a bright white starts at 80 or 85 or

and the Arctic White would not be a bright white.

So actually toward that point, if we maybe want to change it to white in terms of not having full extensive white.

Yeah, I guess I don't know.

75 to 82 is off-white.

Yeah, I agree.

I think if I agree with with Dade, if he

took the term bright.

So it was just use of white is limited to trim and decorative elements.

I think if somebody's coming in with an off-white that is far enough off-white, they could make an argument, well, this is not white, this is so light gray.

And if it is gray enough,

You could say, well, yeah, you have a good point.

That's a light gray, that's not a white.

Same with a cream coming kind of from the brown family too.

Margaret had it right from the beginning.

So you're saying that there is a...

I mean, that seems reasonable to me.

Again, I think without identifying some LRB, without identifying some number at which it's no longer white, I think we're at risk of being in a fuzzy zone all the time.

I guess one of the things I'm thinking is, because in one way it seems like this project doesn't

This particular instance doesn't meet the trim and decorative elements criteria.

But Margaret, you had also mentioned earlier when we were looking at the project, I can't remember the name or the details, but the white panel at the which was kind of a trim or a decorative element.

I think in that situation it wasn't necessarily limited to trim either.

So bigger than trim and bigger than decorative.

Okay, so I guess I'm just wondering if like what we're really talking about is not necessarily the brightness or the

Not brightness, but this question, like, does the trim and decorative elements clause of this give you enough to rule out the cases that we're all thinking of, I guess?

Like, are we ever in situations where, I don't know, like, it seems like the extent is the really thing that keeps coming up in a lot of these cases.

meaning bright white is okay just for a little bit.

If the buildings looked exactly the way they look in this architectural rendering and you think about the color of the paper being bright white, then the building itself you would have to say is off-white.

True.

So if this, anybody who applies for a county-wide certificate of appropriateness, if staff isn't able to approve it, then they can appeal it to the ARB.

So it would just come to you for a full review.

And then you would review it against the standard guidelines.

Well, we'd have the same question.

But you wouldn't be necessarily trying to define bright white.

You would just be looking at it in a broader context.

And do these colors look OK in that location?

I don't know that I would agree that it, I mean, I think there's something about the exterior colors that seem different from the interior colors, because looking at the Sherwin-Williams families, a lot of the things that are at LRV 75 or so on an interior finish definitely read as off-white, but I kind of think that for some reason there's, to me, this reads as more of a white,

White, even though its LRV is 76 or whatever.

I don't know that we're...

I mean, my sense is that this is like as white as they can get basically on an exterior.

and I think that counts.

Like I don't think we're necessarily thinking of exterior bright white as being like anything from 80 up.

Are there any examples that are sort of in the low 70s, high 60s that feel more like

Since the LRV for the Arctic White is sort of

close to some of those borderline cutoffs.

Let me see if I can

Figure out if we've got a house or a townhouse or department building that's using that color.

Margaret, just looking at this application in the county-wide certificate of appropriateness, is there any hierarchy in the colors criteria?

Because there's two entries, there's earth tones, which this application doesn't meet.

And then you go into the specifics on bright white.

Or are they of equal importance?

Now, I don't think one is necessarily more important than the other.

I think what it's just saying is that the colors should be muted earth tones.

I agree.

I guess my concern in this case is clearly they're trying to

use a little bit of this kind of farmhouse vernacular, which is very popular now, right?

Black windows and white siding.

And that's clearly what they're going for.

So the idea of bright white trim in this case doesn't fit because you can put it on the eaves, but that's not what they're trying to create.

And my fear is by eliminating or sticking with this, oh, we can only have muted colors, you kind of eliminate or you make it difficult to create that architectural feel.

And I'm not sure that should be our job.

I mean, I appreciate the concerns about

not drawing too much attention to itself.

I think that's the case.

I don't think we're going to change a lot of these regulations to eliminate that.

I think it's protecting the corridor and the impact on the corridor.

And I think in this instance, Chris's point of, hey, if you're requesting this county-wide certificate of appropriateness where you don't have to go before the board, you should meet these requirements as laid out.

If they want to come to the board and make a case for a certain architectural style or contextually, this is why this works here, you know, they have every right to do that, right, Margaret?

I mean, as an applicant, I think this is an attractive option because there's less risk.

So if I can just do A, B, and C, you know,

Give my project to prove faster.

I mean, I agree with you.

I don't think we want to prescribe a specific style.

But I think throughout the guidelines, we have these ambiguities or these, you know, these gray areas.

And I always get back to I think there's.

We're open to architectural solutions.

You know, and looking for

The project to bring a specific idea and then make the case for why that works.

I think at this point, this discussion has been very helpful.

What I would recommend is that, let me see if I can find an example of the Arctic White out there that we can look at and let me talk with the applicant and maybe we can, maybe we'll be revisiting this at the next meeting.

All right, so the topic of the second work session is the entrance corridor design guidelines addenda for the Greenwood segment of Route 250 West.

Yep, I'm going to bring that up.

Great, okay.

So we're hoping today to get your comments on the content of the one-pager for the Greenwood segment of the Route 250 West corridor.

This one has two pages.

Last time when we met, the Afton segment just had the one, but this one had a lot more images and the segment is longer than the Afton segment was.

I've already identified a couple corrections I know that we need.

The lower right image on this sheet is missing a caption and I think we probably want to make the titles or the labels on the images a little more visible.

We've also, in doing this second segment, we recognize that we need to clarify the pointer in this the predominant landscape features section.

We need to clarify when the item that we're listing isn't meant to be repeated in the future.

So you'll see the act and segment come back to you with a few corrections, just to help clarify that for the readers.

So really we're just looking for comments on the content, on the text, and if you've got other comments on the format as well, happy to hear those.

You can put these up, whichever you'd like to look at.

All right, well, I'll just go down the list and see if anybody has any questions or comments.

I don't.

I think it looks great.

Thank you, Mariah and Margaret.

Just the two little things you mentioned, the labels on the images, maybe if they're white or if they're in a different location, might read a little bit better.

But no, I think it looks really good.

Thanks.

No, I agree with Frank.

I think it looks awesome.

Thanks.

Yeah, same.

I would echo Frank and

Frank's comments.

I think the format looks great.

It's really clean.

Neat.

So thanks.

Thanks, Dade.

Sure.

Yeah, thank you, Chris.

I'll just add my voice to the chorus.

Thank you, Mariah.

Thank you, Margaret.

It's beautiful.

Great format.

Great text.

Thanks.

And you know, I'm going to sound like a copycat here, but I think it looks great.

Great.

Thank you.

Let me move on to the next thing.

So at our last meeting, we assigned the remaining corridors and we discussed the possibility of using a survey form to do that survey work.

So I emailed this draft form to the members who had already completed some of that corridor work just to see if they thought it would be workable.

I didn't get any feedback on that.

My apologies, Margaret.

Thank you for sending it.

OK.

I think it'll work for everyone.

I'll send it back out to everyone.

It is sort of a fillable form.

Tried to come up with some just lists of options, but to give you enough space to add in whatever

If you have other ideas, there's space to add that.

We're not limited to the choices we've given you.

So I don't know.

I also think this looks great.

Great.

OK.

Well, that looks good then.

I will get that out to everybody.

Are you guys still working on inputting the ones from the previous presentations?

Yeah, let me see.

Let me pull up one other thing here to check.

We've got three other segments for the 250 West Quarter.

I would love to get those done by the next meeting, but then there are also one, two, three, four, five other quarters that we already have the survey work done for that we still need to get that format done and get that to y'all.

So that's gonna take us a little bit.

So if board members,

can be working I would say like over the next month or so on their next quarters, next segments, that would be helpful.

I would say the next one, one to two months.

Mariah, do you have anything to add there?

Thank you.

So maybe end of the summer?

That's right.

Great.

All right, well, thank you, and we're on to other business.

Would anybody like to move to adopt the June 6th, 2022 ARB minutes?

Can I get a second on that?

Second.

Mr. Stoner.

Aye.

Mr. Hancock.

All right.

The next ARB meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, July 5th, 2022.

And it will be a virtual meeting.

Sounds like we'll have a quorum now, bar any unforeseen circumstances, so we'll count on doing it.

Are there any other items or questions from anyone?

All right.

Well, in that case, the meeting is adjourned to the next meeting on Tuesday, July 5th.

It's 2.03 by my watch.