Architectural Review Board Meeting   8/21/2023

Yep.

All right.

It is 106 by my watch, and I'm calling the August 21, 2023 meeting of the Albemarle County Architecture Review Board to order.

Mr. Henningsen?

The public may access and participate in the meeting electronically.

Instructions for doing so are posted on the Albemarle County website at the Albemarle County calendar.

The public has real-time audiovisual 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 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.

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.

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

If applicants in the meeting room have team members attending virtually who will need to present, please make that known when you come to the podium.

Everyone who is participating virtually, please mute your microphone until it is your turn to speak.

Yes, I do.

All right, great.

We do not have any consent agenda items today, so we will move on to our one and only regular review item, which is ARB-2023-64 flow CDJR amendment.

Chris, is your presentation ready?

Yes.

The application I'm presenting on today is preliminary review of the renovation plan submitted for Flo Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram Building.

The site is located along Route 29 near the intersection with Hilton Heights Road.

ARB has approved several applications for the site, including two special use permits in 2003, ARB applications in 2003 and 2005 for the original design of phase one and two buildings, and 2013 and 2022 for the renovations to the phase two buildings.

or Phase II building.

A condition one in special use permits is that the design of Phase II building shall be compatible with the Phase I building as determined by the ARB.

To orient you within the site, the Phase I building is the larger building that we're reviewing today with the structured parking on the right side of the site.

And the smaller building on the left is the Phase II building for Subaru.

The renovation of the Subaru building that was approved by the ARB in 2022 added ACM panels, slate-clad towers, and a canopy to elevations visible from Route 29.

Painting the remaining brick and ephus on the east elevation was also proposed, but it was not ultimately approved by the board.

The renovation to the CDJR building would cover the existing ephus-clad entrance element on the east elevation with ACM panels and paint the existing brick

Brick and Eph is gray.

No changes are proposed to the southern portion of the east elevation of the house as a Honda dealership.

ACM panels introduced in the renovation design while at modern building material help reconnect the building with the design of the super building.

However, painting the red brick gray removes the connection to the historic architecture.

and the red brick that remains in the Subaru building in the southern portion of the east elevation of the CDJR building.

Staff recommends revising the renovation design to maintain the red brick.

Also requested with this metal was a vehicle display podium with accent lighting.

A special use permit is required for outdoor sales, storage and or display.

This site has an approved S.P.

Wood condition that does not permit elevated vehicle displays due to them not contributing to orderly and attractive appearance along the entrance corridor.

This is a condition that's been consistently applied to similar S.P.

requests in the county.

Staff has requested that the display podium be removed from the renderings in the next middle.

Staff recommends approval of the major amendment with the revisions listed in the staff report.

Thanks a lot.

Go through and see if any members have questions for staff.

Thanks, Chris.

Thanks.

No questions.

Thanks.

I don't have any questions either.

Thank you board members for paying attention to this application.

My name is Bruce Wardell, I'm an architect and I represent Flow Automotive, who are the owners of the dealership.

The ownership of the dealership has recently changed, so there's a whole series of kind of identification and

Signage that will be coming through as that happens and that will go its separate path.

I spoke with the Flow Automotive this morning, representatives of Flow Automotive this morning, and they would like to withdraw the component of this application that paints the brick.

Through conversations, we just thought that it would make sense to leave the brick its current color.

That means that the application now consists of basically refinishing the stucco in the pelican gray that was submitted.

and then the new canopy, the new entrance portico that is clad in a combination of a kind of satin finish panel and then you can see a small sort of frame around the door that is a kind of reflective finish panel and then the refinishing of the storefront which

would refinish the existing storefront to a basic brushed aluminum storefront.

We understand the rejection of the display of the Jeep on the fake rocks and we're heartbroken to see that go.

Other than that, that consists of the entire application at this point in time.

All right, thanks a lot.

Let's see if board members have questions for the applicant.

Dave, do you have any questions?

No, thank you, Bruce.

Frank?

I don't, thank you.

Thanks, and I don't have any questions either.

Thank you.

So the ARB will now go into discussion.

I think it's a really nice application.

So just thinking about that, I know we, a lot of times the applications come and we're left with a lot of questions.

I feel like it did a really good job answering a lot of those questions with the existing views and explaining all the various relationships between

Parts of this building and then the phase two building, so great work on the application and thank you for that.

All right, thanks a lot.

No, I don't think so.

Thanks, and kind of same goes for me.

I kind of echo what Frank said.

The only potential concern I had was regarding the paint.

So without that,

on the table.

I don't really have any issues or concerns with that.

We're going to try a different strategy for pulling this up today and see if it works.

Just note that we do have the material samples there we can pass around and would recommend

Leaving the item in about the maintaining the red brick, just because that's what the drawings are showing, the minutes can show.

I have stricken it.

This is a new format we're trying.

There we go.

Not here.

All right.

I'm going to have to get used to this new format.

I don't know if I can handle this.

Please excuse any mistakes.

I move to approve the major amendment with the following revisions amended as follows, strike item number two.

Is that right?

I think that's great.

Sorry.

And I'll second the motion.

All right, thanks a lot.

Thank you, Bruce.

Thanks.

All right, so we have one work session today for ARB-2023-52 Seville-Rio Road Apartments.

If you all recall, in March of this year, the ARB approved the final site plan for this application pending staff approval of several conditions.

In May and July of this year, staff received re-siminals intended to address those conditions.

However, staff believes that the following conditions have not been sufficiently addressed.

The first conditions regarding the design of the equipment utility structures on the side elevations of buildings one through three.

Since the previous review, the material has been revised from a flat, hearty panel to a board and batten panel that matches materials used elsewhere on the end elevation.

However, the minimal change results in these structures still retaining utilitarian appearance.

Additionally, since the previous board review, a utility structure has been added to the north elevation of Building 4.

Another change to note since the board reviewed the applications, the addition of a standalone structure east of building four.

The building uses materials found in the apartment buildings, but is a maintenance building set very close to the entrance quarter.

Regarding the landscape plan, along the perimeters of the site, large shade trees are now shown.

However, the spacing of the interior pedestrian parking lot trees remains inconsistent, and some of the trees do not meet the required caliber size.

I'd be happy to answer any questions.

All right, thanks a lot.

No, not right now.

All right, Frank Hancock.

Thanks, Chris.

The new, I guess, maintenance shed,

Okay, and that one has popped up since we've seen that last review didn't approve.

Okay.

Gotcha.

And then maybe if we could go back to the landscape plan, the comment.

Was it the tree distribution on the interior, like streets or parking lot?

I guess if you want to go back to the original presentation that just had your bullet points.

Let's look at that one.

I should have looked for this.

It just popped into my head.

Did the applicant meet

like numbers requirement.

I'd say that's probably seven of the ones being counted for interior trees.

So 29 or 30 are consistent, but have more even distribution.

They're smaller caliber trees and just kind of gathered in that one location.

Yeah, I'm definitely sympathetic to applicants when you're trying to cram all this stuff with these buildings, these utilities, I mean,

And it's probably a lot of the underlying conditions aren't even showing up on this maybe, or they're in the background that are affecting those decisions.

Cause I'm just knowing an applicant, those are usually like, you know, pretty easy to, to obtain the landscaping requirements and seeing they're up against some, some issues like that, but that's helpful.

Thank you.

Just wanted to try to understand that better.

All right.

Thanks, Frank.

No.

Frank asked the one I had about the new structure at the north.

All right.

Thanks.

Tara, do you have any questions?

Oh, I just, I already said no.

Frank?

Yeah, just one question with regard to the parking.

Is the parking shown the minimum by code?

They're under.

All right.

Thanks.

I don't have any questions.

Thank you very much.

I'm Scott Collins, Collins Engineering here representing the applicant.

Also, the team of architects and landscape architects as well are on the Zoom call as well.

So I think they would like to talk a little bit about the architecture aspects.

So I appreciate that.

Two things I can kind of weigh in and on.

Yeah, so we did get, we are getting a parking reduction on this project, 20%, so we're at 1.5 spaces per unit, so we definitely try to reduce that as much as possible.

The second thing about it, speaking to Frank's comment about the landscaping utilities, we've done everything we can to bring utilities more into the travel ways as much as possible.

We added extra manholes, a lot of time with the storm sewer running down the roads.

We're using actually DI2B and 2C boxes in a lot of locations that brings pipes up underneath the curbs so we can get the five feet separation, especially for the street trees along.

sort of the main driveway travel way that goes down to the property behind us so we've done a lot to kind of really focus on the fact that we knew we were going to be really tight on landscaping and we've done you know almost everything we could to do to get all that moved out we recognized that you know there's a couple spots just like you were talking about that does get a little bit a little light on some spots but a little heavy on the other spots to kind of

kind of even it out, but we've done a lot of different aspects to make all that happen.

So that was the main thing with the landscaping aspects on this project.

And at this time, I'll turn it over to the architects and let them talk a little bit more about the architecture aspects.

Thanks.

For anybody that's joining via Zoom, if you'd like to speak, please use the raise hand feature so I can unmute you.

Hi everyone, this is Lynn Halabi from Land Design.

We're the landscape architects on the project.

I just want to just state a little bit more on the idea of where we had

Our landscape and how we divided it.

Frank, to answer your question, we are meeting all the requirements.

We do have a cluster that Chris was talking about and we tried to make it very purposeful by having like a boss of smaller trees, rather than having bigger trees that

are placed in a closer grouping.

And that's why we have smaller canopy trees.

All of the calipers, though, are the bigger calipers.

We are trying to get bigger trees.

And then we did plant everywhere we could on site.

And then obviously, as everyone has mentioned, there are a lot of utilities on site that do cross a lot of the potential locations that we couldn't.

And that's where we couldn't plant any trees.

And so that's why there are some

Holes, as they were called.

So yeah, I just want to explain a little bit more from our perspective.

We did try to be as mindful as possible, spacing out all the trees, all of the requirements are met.

Okay, all right, thank you.

Good afternoon, this is Nicholas Geiderman with Hefner Architects in Alexandria, Virginia, and I'm hoping to have a little conversation with the board about the sort of the concerns over the utilitarian nature of the utility rooms that have been added to the masses of buildings one, two, and three along Rio Road.

So I think kind of the

An iteration that you're currently reviewing and that was in the presentation this afternoon.

I think we are kind of first thought was that we would make the same sort of gabling gesture

You know, so rather than leaving like a single shed roof, lean-to type building that was sort of just grafted onto the main mass of at least trying to keep the character of and work within the existing vocabulary without almost overemphasizing it, without turning, you know, a utility room into a giant significant bay that is in line with the center gables, or I guess in some of the cases, slightly offline with the center gables.

that it sort of became a formal conundrum.

And I think we tried to err on the side of minimizing it.

Well, I guess

We'll just go through the board members individually and see if anyone has any comments or questions related to that.

Dade, do you have any reactions?

They're typically about four or five feet deep.

I think that there's some variation of what they're servicing.

I guess without prescribing anything, somewhat sympathetic to the applicant's question, I don't know that necessarily the gable helps.

It maybe calls more attention to it.

I guess Chris and maybe the applicant, can you remind me what the first proposal for these bays was?

that we found out was a flat hardy panel to them in still gable form.

All surface behind it, all one base or is there actually a break?

I assume that would just be a rendering, wonky rendering or rendering issue.

And we'll let Nicholas talk again.

Thank you.

Sorry.

No, I keep myself very good company on these calls.

So yes, the sorry, the intention to answer both questions.

One was in the previous iteration where we were the all black solid panel, we wound up spanning both the main mass of the secondary gable as well as a bay, a visual bay, flat plane, but a material expression of a bay.

And what wound up happening was I think the end result was almost calling too much attention now to this sort of back of house feature that it was interrupting two other masses of the building.

So I think in this iteration, we're letting it be more of a subtler element within an overall element rather than spanning across two other building vocabularies.

And yes, the intention would be

We would have swinging hinged doors, not garage, not coiling overhead doors.

That would be the current one, but they're very similar other than the

I guess just as a possible alternative if these are doors to I assume unconditioned spaces that the utility entrances are in could they instead of being swinging doors be you know gates made to resemble the siding so that the openings would effectively not

stand out at all.

I think that in an iteration we've seen where you almost end up with a darker sense of an opening by having just an open grill or hinged gate rather than having a solid panel door that's painted to match the siding.

Yes, yeah, and I have another question for the applicant too.

Earlier you mentioned that like these vary in function, like some are for storage, some are for electrical.

Is it possible that the door changes based on what type of use is in it?

I think that that rendering was just incorrect.

I think that for telecom, I think that there is one closet that would require pairs of doors, because that's going to be a shallower closet with kind of wider panels within it.

So in order to get our access clearance, it's sort of a trade off that it would, you know,

It either would be a deeper closet that we don't have room for in order to achieve a walk-in essentially with a turnaround or just a shallow wide closet with pairs of double doors.

Thanks.

I guess I might be in the minority with this opinion, but I thought that at least based on the prime example that we were looking at, the applicant successfully addressed the concerns we had last time.

However, it seemed like some of the other building types, the treatment of

These additions changed a little bit and there were some that had like a simple shed roof and some that had like a kind of a hip type roof situation where it was just kind of hanging off of the building and not this kind of gable end statement.

Was that, is that,

I wasn't sure if I needed to raise my hand again.

Can you hear me?

Yeah, thank you.

You are correct.

I think that the gable treatment was sort of reserved to the more high visibility buildings directly on Rio Road.

So I think where you're seeing either hips or gables, that's sort of back on like building six and building five sort of tucked in the back corner of the site, facing the neighboring property rather than the main gateway itself.

Alright, thank you.

Chris, can we see those versions?

Okay.

Go back to the site plan too.

Landscape planned?

Is that right, Frank?

Building four.

and on this elevation, this end, we're building other electrical and water and storage fund.

And then there is one.

Do you mind zooming in on those again that are on the ends that are most visible at the entrances?

So that this one would then shed shed form.

You saw one of the renderings.

This elevation doesn't does not have it does have a form.

Next one would be facing inward to the parking lot along the entrance corridor.

Similar form facing inward to the parking lot.

Water storage seems, some of the uses vary as alluded by the applicant.

One last one.

I guess a question maybe for the applicant.

I mean, just tossing out, it seems like the ones that are on the sides at the entrance roads, if there were a well-placed shrubber or a few, coupled with painting the doors to match the siding, so they just become very mute, I think would solve that.

The one that's at the end facing the EC at the northern building seems a little more challenging in terms of planting it out.

So that's I guess the other question related to that one at the north is there is that area way or there appears to be an area way at that end of the building.

That's a great change.

Yeah.

That was one thought I had is that does that move to the lower level?

Right.

Is there a way and then it's less visible.

Right.

Right now it's up.

looks to be five or six feet up.

That seems to be the one.

I was just about to say I might have to defer to Scott, to our civil engineer on this, as far as what our flexibility on relocating utility connections as far as getting that electric room down.

I mean, I would say from an accessibility standpoint, it certainly could pose some challenges

as far as maintaining our two means of egress from a room where we have switch gear.

Yeah, I mean, if it's not blocking,

Any windows on that lower level, which I don't know if that's the case or not.

That would have to refer back to the architects on that.

But if it's not blocked the windows, we could possibly take that wall and extend it out a little bit further, obviously, because you don't see much that wall.

And that would that should give you enough clearance from that room from the doors to swing open and to get any mechanical

items in and out there and that area again pulling that wall out would give us enough room to run utilities up that corridor to that room so I mean that could be a possibility as long as I guess the main thing is as long as it works from an architectural standpoint I know you know with bedrooms you have to have you know certainly egress but I can't I don't know if that's a bedroom back in that corner or not but

God, it looks like existing access to those utility doors is kind of up a pretty steep hill right now.

I think that's somewhat of a rendering thing too, because when you come around off the parking lot around there, it's actually pretty flat.

And then the doors are, in front of the doors is pretty flat right there.

And then it started to come down.

But you also have a little bit of flexibility just being a utility closet for water or for electrical.

They can step up as well, but it's not as severe as it looks.

I think it's a pretty nice maintenance building.

And I think it actually breaks up that edge where it would have just been kind of dead space's parking lot.

It's kind of tucked up in the corner of the parcel too.

I know it is EC facing, but

I'd much rather have a building, especially with some architectural character like this facing the corridor than, you know, the front of cars.

I don't think it'll look like this day one with this lush vegetation, but I think it will get there.

My two cents.

Yeah, I guess for my part, I thought that kind of breaking up the Gable ends with the smaller kind of sub Gable gave it

More kind of interest, I guess.

Yeah, I mean, you can almost read as like a clubhouse type, like community type building, I think.

You just get a glimpse of it.

If you go up and inspect it and see the size of it, you wouldn't think that.

I guess the last thing would be, I wasn't sure where we ended with the interior landscaping.

The reduction of parking spaces down to 374, which require

37 trees, 29 or 30 of them are at three and a half which is above the caliber requirement but there are those seven that are ornamental trees not large shade trees as required so it's kind of a give and take of higher caliber but there are some that are

Are these the only ornamental trees?

Okay.

What's that portion with the parking lot that has like a roundabout or that goes around on the left hand side?

There's a red portion marked in between two double loaded parking lots on the left hand side of this drawing.

Scroll down, I get up so we can see the top.

Yeah, it's a lot of right away and a whole lot of underground utilities plus an overhead utility line.

It is just clustered with so much utilities right there.

I guess we kind of talked about the beginning of the first Airbnb, but

You know, we've been working with Margaret and Chris before we even submitted the resilient application, just kind of working on replacement of these buildings, knowing that that was going to be a huge concern with that.

And we worked it out to where we'd have at least 10 feet of planting, of tree planting area.

in front of each of these buildings with all the utilities and all the buffer.

I guess my thought on where the applicant is deficient in some of the plantings, you could focus any of that on any of the corridors or the breaks between the buildings, just as if you think about it, how it impacts the entrance corridor.

I mean, what's directly behind the buildings to the back of the site, we're not as concerned with, but if there's an island that's kind of at the end of your entrance drive that's visible from the entrance corridor that doesn't have a tree,

that might be worth seeing if something could shift there.

But I do appreciate the going above and beyond in the extra or the other plantings, knowing that you were going to be deficient in some places.

And like I said at the beginning, I feel your pain.

It's hard to get all of these things in here.

It's very tight.

It's similar to interior parking area, two and a half inch caliber.

In this site, a lot of similar sites, they usually double as one in the same.

I've taken notes on your comments.

If we could just look over what I've drafted here to make sure we're all on the same page.

Okay, so the first issue was the design of the equipment slash utility structures on buildings one, two, three, and four.

What I've got is A, add shrubs to soften the appearance of the utility structures at buildings one, two, and three, and B, revise the design to move the access to the utility structure at building four to the lower level.

I don't know how others feel.

I'm not sure the gable end to the utility structure really is an improvement, quite honestly.

Right, use the shed.

Yeah, I mean, a utility room is, by its very nature, going to look utilitarian.

So yeah, I think you can only

Dress it up so much before it's making more out of itself than it should.

I think there was just that one corridor-facing example, and I think if they are able to locate it kind of below grade, that seemed like the one that was really

I don't know if it's something for our future guideline update but similar to how we say that there won't be mechanical equipment visible from the entrance corridors we might want to say mechanical equipment room entrances.

Okay.

The second item regarding the added structure east of Building 4, you don't need any changes.

You're okay with it as it is.

Okay.

My thought.

Yeah, as proposed.

Was the board okay with the ornamentals and maybe particularly if they had more consistent spacing and not grouped often to the one location that maybe traded away.

The question is it's grouping

My opinion is kind of by grouping it, it's like the size of an individual tree or component of that.

I agree.

All right.

All right, so we will move on to other business, first of which is approval of the August 7th, 2023 minutes.

I'll move for that approval.

I'll second.

Okay, good.

Mr. Hancock.

All right, thank you.

Other items.

Do any board members or staff have any other items they would like to discuss?

If I may just maybe for future discussion, every time I drive 64 over the Rivanna, I'm reminded that when we reviewed the application for the development there, there were trees shown in all the visualizations screening the development and there clearly are none.

Yes.

We'll get back to you on that as soon as possible.

Thank you.

Yes.

It's over near Martha Jones.

Yes, exactly.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, you're right.

Right.

Right.

It was, yeah.

Marsha Joseph, right, email.

Nothing has been decided yet.

I don't even think there is a specific proposal yet.

I think there's a survey out.

I don't know if it's still open.

But yeah, the county is studying both its ordinance and the wireless infrastructure.

There are still significant areas of the county without good coverage.

I can...

So board members may be interested in commenting on that.

Next meeting, the next ARB meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, September 5th, 2023.

I presume that's the day after Labor Day.

Are there any board members who do not think they'll be able to attend?

All right.

In that case, this meeting is adjourned until our next meeting on September 5th, 2023.

And by my watch, it's 2 15.

All right.

Thanks, Chris.

Thanks, Chris.