Architectural Review Board Meeting   7/5/2022

All right, so it's 1.01 p.m.

I'm calling the July 5, 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.

Architectural Review Board members present electronically are Frank Hancock, Taro Matsuno, and myself, Chris Henningsen.

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

The public has real-time audio-visual access to this meeting over Zoom and real-time audio access over telephone.

Both is provided in the 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 provide 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, great.

All right, great.

There is one consent agenda item today.

It is ARB 2022-47 Forest Lake Self Storage.

Does any ARB member want to move the Forest Lake self-storage application off the consent agenda for discussion?

No.

I'll move that we approve the consent agenda.

All right.

All right.

Mr. Matsuno?

Aye.

Thank you.

There's one regular review item today.

It is ARB 2022-48 Overlook Hotel.

Chris, do you have a presentation ready?

Yes.

Hold on one second.

The application you're viewing today is a final site plan for a four-story Woodstream and Suites hotel with surface parking surrounding and associated site improvements.

Subject property is located on the south side of Route 250 west of the intersection of Hanson Road and Route 250.

The most recent version of this initial plan was reviewed by the ARB in November 2021 and February 2022.

To summarize the staff report, the focus is largely on the landscaping of the retaining walls used to establish the site.

Regarding the building design, the material and color samples provided confirm their appropriateness in relation to the surrounding context of the site.

The only change to the building since the previous middle is the base being revised from a thin to a full-size brick.

A variety of detail for the porch canopy element shows that it would use black ACM panels that relate to the overall building design.

Regarding site landscaping, since the previous review, three cryptomere trees have been added at the base of the lowest retaining wall on the west side of the site.

However, the cryptomere trees proposed for the site are spaced too closely for their anticipated spread, and there are large gaps in the drooping along the base of the walls.

Providing greater spacing between the trees along the base of the walls will allow these trees, as they mature, to mitigate the visual impact of the overall wall structure from the entrance corner.

Staff recommends approval of the final site plan with the revisions listed in the staff report.

All right, Chris, thanks for that presentation.

Frank Hancock, do you have any questions?

I don't.

Thanks, Chris.

Thank you for the presentation, Chris.

All right, thanks.

So Kevin, do you have a presentation ready?

Yes, thank you.

Can you all see the screen?

Yeah, great.

Good afternoon.

My name is Kevin Shaffer.

I'm the studio director for the Charlottesville branch of Design and Develop.

I have with me here on the call today Rachel Moon, who is representing Shimp Engineering

as well as Doug Ellis, who is representing Suburban Capital.

Thanks as always to Chris and county staff for their diligent staff reports and the guidance through the ARB process.

As staff mentioned previously, just to briefly summarize the process to date, this project initially came before the board in November of last year.

And at that time, the board and county staff had several comments regarding the architectural appearance.

So a revised preliminary submission was reviewed in February of this year.

That submission garnered more favorable comments with a few remaining detailed questions that was to be answered in our final submission.

So included in this final submission are the responses to those outstanding comments from the previous submissions.

including ensuring all the correct notes regarding the selected color of the retaining wall material, notes regarding flush-mounted PTAC units, detail for the decorative guardrail at the retaining walls, and the requested detailing for the porch elements on the entrance corridor side of the building.

Also included in this first final submission was the revised landscaping plans per county staff comments.

On the architectural side of the project, we refined our material selections, as staff noted, by working with Deb Brown at Allied Concrete to select a brick that was locally sourced, readily available, and came in both standard full depth sizes and a thin brick veneer size option.

So that brick that was selected is the General Shale Raleigh quart brick, which is manufactured in Renup and is one of the standard colors.

This brick selection allows for both a full depth brick base, and it has a water table shape that will mark the change in dimensionality between the first and second levels.

We utilize soldier course decorative banding as shown on these elevations, and we're marking each floor level with a soldier course as well as above windows.

Additionally, Deb helped us specify the retaining wall material

which is manufactured by Belguard and is the Anchor Diamond Pro stone cut segmented block.

This material is produced in the Richmond plant and is frequently used around this area including the wall walls across the street.

Additional detailing was requested at the side porch element.

After exploring several material options including cars and painted CMU columns, heaps hardy,

and Brick Options.

We selected the aluminum composite metal panel for a few reasons.

First, that material is immediately adjacent to the break metal trim that is used throughout the rest of the project in the coping and the fascia trim.

And we felt like those two materials should match each other.

We also had maintenance concerns regarding the painting that would be required on a part and painted CMU, as well as the hardy panel.

and finally Eves would have been a poor choice just being at ground level and close proximity to pedestrians.

The dark color of the coping and the facie trim is utilized by those porch elements, the columns, and it becomes a unifying material for a cohesive design.

And this sheet shows our anticipated construction techniques

and provides insight into the anticipated look and feel of the side porch elements.

All right.

Thank you, Kevin.

So as described by staff, the majority of the comments were related to the landscaping plan.

So first, in this exhibit, the cryptomerias have been revised to reflect the mature spread of the tree, which also provided for greater spacing of the cryptomerias and would better screen the retaining wall at the base.

The landscape plan also swapped out the two southern magnolias towards the west elevation for two shad blow service berries, which would have a more narrow spread.

The detail for the retaining wall spacing with the trees has been updated to detail a minimum of three feet off the wall and

where that was a little snug towards the rear parking area.

We've revised the parking layout to allow a little bit more breathing room for those large shade trees in the back.

And finally, the landscape plan, the schedule has been updated so that all the shrubs will be 24 inches at the time of planting.

All right, thank you for that presentation.

Okay.

And then I just have a question for Kevin Shaffer.

And same brick?

Same brick.

Those are the only questions I had.

Thank you.

Thanks, Frank.

I do not.

Thank you.

Thanks.

I also do not have any questions.

Do not think so.

Let me double check.

No, we don't have any attendees at this time.

All right.

Great.

Thank you.

ARB will now go into discussion.

No, I'd just like to thank the applicant for, you know,

Working with county staff to come to this point.

I appreciate the modifications.

All right.

Thank you, Frank.

I agree.

This the presentation, the applicant's presentation was very helpful, especially as just walking through the landscape comments and responses and how

You plan to address those.

Just thinking about the Cryptomeria spacing as installed, that's going to look really sparse.

So my only comment would just be maybe to work with staff is make sure that satisfies what staff is looking for as far as we don't want to go too far on the other end.

You know, it's definitely a constrained growing space.

So I don't know if we can use or if we should use that full mature

All right thanks Frank I

Also agree.

I appreciate how the applicant has handled this whole process and I guess, well done.

Margaret, we can see that you're trying to share, but we can't see your document.

All right, now let's try it again, Margaret.

Nicole, if you can hear me.

There you are.

Yeah, my mouse has a mind of its own.

Just want to make sure you're OK.

I couldn't unmute.

Yes.

Awesome.

All right, thank you.

I don't have any adjustments or suggestions.

I think these are all fairly reasonable.

I think the only thing, and I guess I would defer to Frank, is just if we'd want to change language on the

Spacing to accommodate the applicant working with staff to resolve that issue.

Frank?

That's a good question.

I don't know if the comment as it stands is enough in the conversation or review we've had today.

would be enough direction for the applicant when they make this final submittal.

So we could add this, consider the constrained planting area in the spacing.

I'll move to approve ARB-2022-48 Overlook Hotel with the conditions listed in the staff report amended as follows.

Edit item number two,

All right, thank you.

I'll second that.

All right, so we have two work sessions today.

The first one is on the county-wide certificate of appropriateness criteria for structures located 750 feet or more from the entrance corridor.

At our last meeting, June 21st, we talked about the criteria for the countywide certificate of appropriateness for buildings that are 750 feet or more from the entrance corridor.

We focused on the color criteria and the reference to limiting the use of bright white.

We brought this up in reference to our review of a proposal for an apartment building complex in North Point Development.

And we ended that discussion on June 21st with two follow-up items.

One was to look for an example of the Arctic white that was used on a completed project so that everyone could do a drive-by and take a look at it.

And then the second point was for me to just talk with the applicant about changing the colors for the project because either the white or the blue met the criteria.

So I did talk with the applicants and they are considering alternate color palettes.

And we found an example of the Arctic white siding.

This is a photo of a clubhouse in the development in Crozet that uses the Arctic white siding.

And in this photo, the end elevation of the clubhouse is

on the left side of the photo, and there are townhouses in the distance.

Most of those have more muted tones than the Arctic white, but you can see a couple of spaces where the white does show up.

Let me see if I can highlight those.

For example, this one here and maybe this one down here.

So

Yeah, it might be useful just for a discussion.

I guess there was some amount of discussion last week about kind of, you know, is,

Is Arctic white?

How white is it?

It seems pretty darn white to me.

And I think just in general, if white is considered not appropriate for entrance corridors, then

You know, I think Arctic White to me at least falls squarely in the category of white.

Personally, I don't think white is is inappropriate, but to me, that's like a completely different question.

I think, you know, if the question is, does Arctic White qualify as white?

It certainly does, in my opinion.

Yeah, I mean, I know that we all kind of got we all threw in our two cents on the many facets of this question.

And I know that not everybody is here to continue this discussion, but I had an opportunity to visit that seemed white.

Yeah, and I

I do feel like I was won over by Frank's argument that because this is part of the administrative review process rather than a full board review process that questions like this ideally should not be questions like this should not be coming up in this type of process so I think as far as my general position goes you know as long as we are

agreeing that the earth tones are sort of something we can, that we're sort of blanket in favor of as if you're meeting this criteria, you can move through the process faster than I think that seems pretty reasonable and that this would qualify as a white.

Thanks.

I agree, Chris and with Taro, I think it's also a question of scale.

And when you're looking at this kind of single family residential scale versus, you know, three, four story apartment building scale of the white being the predominant, you know, I think there's a reason our guidelines are written that way, so.

I appreciate, you know, passing along this example.

It sounds like the applicant's willing to kind of go back and review or take a look at the colors again.

So yeah, this, this is white and I, yeah, I kind of agree with Chris.

Yeah, and to the scale point, like I was noticing that too when driving around, like this clubhouse is kind of broken up into several different volumes.

It kind of minimizes the impact of it.

The townhouses down the road, like they all use it, but they use it on just one of those townhomes at a time and sort of do the various shades of gray down the road.

Yeah, I agree.

I thought that was a really good point to make, Frank.

But still, we're talking about kind of administrative review where I feel like it should be a little more cut and dry than it might be in the context of a full board review where there's a little bit more latitude and an opportunity to explain some design choices and, you know,

That's what I needed.

All right.

Well, thank you.

So the topic of our second work session is the Entrance Corridor Design Guidelines Addenda for the Crozet segment of Route 250 West.

Pull that one up.

So today we're hoping to get your comments on the content of the agenda for the Crozet segment of the Route 250 West corridor.

This segment is longer than the previous ones that we've looked at, and that has resulted in a longer general characteristics section.

And that then led us to move the photos to the second sheet, where some of the previous

templates yourself some photos across the bottom of the first sheet as well.

You may have noticed in this segment, the images have the addresses that are more readable.

Hopefully that format works for you all.

But before we move on to discuss schedule, we could stop here for comments on the text and the format of this segment.

In addition to comments on the specific text and images, just something to keep in mind as we're moving through this process.

When you are reviewing these segments, if the quarter is one that you surveyed or if it's one that you travel often, please consider when you're reviewing it, if the text and the images, if it's looking like and sounding like they're accurately capturing the character of the segment or the character of the corridor.

Thanks.

I don't want to be too nitpicky because I generally think that this has been great and it's awesome to see the sort of rate of production and just being able to review these more frequently coming up with a

Regular rhythm.

I guess just it would be nice to have some paragraph breaks in the general characteristics sections to make it a little bit more readable.

Hopefully that's not too much of an imposition or too nitpicky of a comment.

And generally, I really appreciate all this work that you all are putting in.

If you want to be nitpicky, it's fine.

All right.

Thanks, Taro.

My only comment is it looks great.

Nice work.

And to see the template be adaptable, you know, like you had said, how you'd set it up for corridors that had more examples than, you know, this is perfectly done.

That's good.

All right.

Thanks, Frank.

I agree 100%.

I think this looks great.

And it's nice to see that the template is working.

particularly on a segment like this where there's a few areas with different character in one segment.

So.

I did have one kind of question.

Sorry about that.

Just came back to me.

Is it worth showing an image of the Harris Teeter Building

I know like scale wise, we referenced that with other projects near or either within this segment or near this segment.

I think the brick detailing is worth noting and just the mass of a grocery store building on the corridor, I think it's pretty successful.

It doesn't overpower.

I think that's a good point.

Mariah, maybe we could look at combining two of the images that we've got in there right now, like you did the two street views so that we could add the Harris Theater building.

Yeah, we can do that.

Great, we'll look at making those changes.

Bring them to you for next time.

Great.

Can we move on to talk about schedule?

OK, so I have drafted a schedule for completing the rest of the work that's to be done.

Flexibility is going to be key.

We think that we can get one segment done per week, so we'd love to be able to bring two to each meeting in the future, but we'll just have to just remain flexible depending on what other workload is coming up.

With the survey work that's already been completed by board members, that will take us to the beginning of September.

So what I've done here, and this is a two-page schedule, I've got work for Airbnb members to be completed in six-week increments.

So each member would be completing one quarter by August 15th.

and then another one by late September and then the last by early November.

And if that all works out, like I've got it here, we would be done by the end of the year.

It does feel ambitious, but we're gonna do our best to keep to that.

So the question for our board members is, do you think that the schedule will work for you?

And obviously,

We'll follow up and send this to you.

So what it would mean is, let's see, for those present today, Chris, by August 15th, Route 20 South, you would have surveyed, and Frank, Hydraulic Road, and Taro 29 North, which is a lot of work.

and then by the end of September, Frank Rial Road, Chris Fifth Street, Taro Airport Road and then by early November, Frank Rial Road, Chris you got Interstate 64 of the East End and Frank

Six weeks seems like a really reasonable amount of time to do that.

That to me seems like a reasonable amount of time to get it into your schedule and do it.

Yeah, I'd agree with doing it.

I mean, yeah, like when the deadline approaches, and I guess to that end, I think this seems very reasonable.

The one thing I would ask is if we can, as a group, revisit this as we review new segments, just so that we can all, because August 15th feels far away now, so I just want to make sure that we're all tracking the closer it approaches, so we have a good

Well, you know, what I'll do is each time we're presenting a segment, a template to you, I'll have this in the presentation and then we'll try to fill it in as we go so everyone's aware.

And as you start or as you continue the survey work as you're using that, the form,

Thank you very much.

Great.

All right, great.

I actually have one question.

Sorry.

I'm really glad that you all like the format a lot.

One of the main things that we are trying to do in this is make sure that the content is right.

So even though it looks pretty as the information right, is there at the scale that we're giving it to you, I know it's not as

Exceptionally legible, but is this a good way to review the narrated parts of it?

Or would a document be better?

I just noticed that a lot of comments we're getting are about format, but not necessarily word changes.

And I think the ARB has always been very detailed.

To me, this form seems just as easy as a document.

I just think, at least for these two segments, which I travel those segments just frequently, I thought it was a really good description of the segments that we've seen so far.

I personally didn't.

take issue with any of the verbiage or think there were any really omissions made.

And I think at least for these segments, I would have noticed that just because like I said, I'm on 250 all the time.

One thing to note, it looks like you're already doing this, but maybe while you're writing or reviewing, if you kind of cross reference the design guidelines and just check language,

or examples that directly relate back to the design guidelines.

I think that I've noticed some of that in the language you've used, but just might be worth writing it, reviewing the design guidelines and going back and seeing if there are lines you can draw back.

Great idea.

If there are no issues, I don't mean to make an issue out of nothing.

Well, I guess to that point, just being someone who's coming into some of this process a little bit later, I guess I just want to, can we revisit the process by which these segments are being created?

I guess I'm just wondering, are there multiple points of review of the content?

Are we placing it directly into the template and approving the template there?

Are we going back and forth?

Yeah, I think that the plan is for you to fill in the

Fill in the form and then we'll meet and talk with you about your impressions of what you found.

And then we will take what you've written and what you filled in on the form and what we've discussed in our meeting with you.

And we'll put it into the one pager.

And then I guess we could then maybe run a draft by

by you individually, whoever did the survey work, and then maybe adjust it before we bring it to the ARB as a full group.

No, that sounds great.

I guess I just felt like I wasn't necessarily reading, assuming that I was the only one vetting it, you know, to that level of like checking the claims.

So I didn't have specific, like,

I didn't have any like factual questions.

I did get the sense that it was well put together and that I was kind of on board with the general content of it.

So I just wanted to be clear about sort of how much review the content is getting and what our role is in reviewing the pieces once they come out.

All right, great.

I'll second that.

Yes.

Thanks.

The next ARB meeting is scheduled for July 18th, 2022.

This will be a virtual meeting.

I'm sorry, could you repeat that date again?

I'm just going to go back.

July 18th.

July 18th is fine.

OK.

I also am planning on it.

So are there any other items for discussion or questions or anything?

If not, then this meeting is adjourned until the next meeting on July 18th.

Thank you.

Have a great few weeks.