Creative Office Revamp Combines Barn, Café and Roof Deck

Plotting the vision for a first office can be tricky, especially if you’re an artificial intelligence startup graduating from a coworking setup to a seven-year lease in your own custom-built digs. Throw in the challenges of renovating a modest, century-old relic of a building amid the threat of a pandemic, and you’re liable to give up and go back to hot desking.

That wasn’t the case for Clinc AI, though, which worked with architect Synecdoche Design Studio and the building's owner during the most difficult of years to craft a custom creative space that will adapt into 2022 and beyond.

Clinc AI was doubling its headcount when it hired Synecdoche in 2019, and the biggest challenge it faced in its hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan, was finding a singular space large enough to house up to 150 people in a desirable location downtown.

The locally based architecture firm quickly homed in on the perfect spot, however, because it had already walked through this particular storied building several times, envisioning how the quirky space might be transformed into a lively, modern office suite.

Situated on a corner plot with a Walk Score of 99, the underused 20,000-square-foot property was ripe for redevelopment. In fact, its owner Wickfield Properties had already been in talks with Synecdoche about that possibility.

Wickfield had to prepare a tenant improvement allowance just to help get the 90-year-old former railroad-anchored grocery depot, which had barely been used in recent years, inhabitable to start. The spot, which had also been a Sears storage facility at one point and then later an occasional thrift store, had a lot of potential, but the design team had their work cut out for them.

“Everything needed to be replaced — all the plumbing, all the bathrooms, all the windows, and you’d need to demo out everything,” Synecdoche Director of Design Adam Smith told LoopNet. “But we didn’t have a huge budget, so we had to think about removing as much as possible and only putting back in what’s necessary, which allowed us to let the building itself really show off in the end.”

After gutting the three interconnected buildings — which included the storefront, curio barnlike structure and an infill annex connecting the two — Synecdoche had an interesting shell with a lot of possibilities.

Though a blank slate was challenging in its own way. “It wasn’t the normal process of working directly with the founder or owners,” Smith said. “We worked with a separate team from Clinc who was really trying to figure out how they were going to live in this building. Clinc didn’t know how they were going to need to use it, especially since the company was growing fast and they had only worked in a coworking space before.”

The goal, he said, was to design it to be “as flexible as possible, but to make it interesting and fun.”

Division between areas came naturally, Smith said. “The way the building was already built helped out in a way.” For one, the barn and annex space were connected, yet separate from the main structure and could therefore serve quite different purposes.

Most of the spaces in the building were tight, with a lot of columns, he explained. But the barn and annex were more open, so that whole section could be used as a café lounge, with a training room on the second floor that opens via garage doors to a rooftop deck — and all of that portion could be public-facing.

“We thought about this section as a more public space so that you could close and lock the door that goes into the office area and have a party on the roof without worrying about people going in conference rooms or through peoples’ desks.”

Entering from the roof deck, the reception lounge and adjacent library are a liminal zone. “There are two meeting rooms — a quiet room and a mother's room, right off the library,” he continued. “So, visitors can come right in and go to the bathroom or go right into the smaller meeting room and they’re not having to go through the whole space. We call it a living room.”

In the office area, “We wanted to keep desks close to as many windows as possible,” Smith said. “All the conference rooms are on the inside in the center and all of the desks and workspaces are on the perimeter, so everybody gets as much [access to] windows as possible.”

The office area is a bit more purposefully bare bones. “We spent the money on the areas that will actually get used the most — like the café, where everybody comes together.”

Budget was a key challenge, especially since the building needed a lot of work. For one, it had been ravaged by a fire a half-century ago. “When we did uncover everything, all of the inside was charred and burned,” Smith said. “Working with old buildings, you can analyze it all you want from the outside, but you don’t really know the full extent of what needs to be done until you get in and start cutting things away.”

Because of these surprises, drawings had to change on the fly — meaning Synecdoche worked with the contractor Brivar Construction Co. at every step of the process, even though the job was a standard design-bid-build contract. The existing floor in the now-café, for example, was sloping and had to be demoed to make way for a whole new concrete slab.

“We had to demo as much as possible in some areas and do an all-new structure, with new footings and foundations, all while keeping the main electrical components in a little shed,” he added. “It was a bit of a puzzle to get all of that into the right spot, but it worked out.”

The pandemic also strangled material supply during the process, meaning deliveries were late. Adding to that setback, the team had to pivot last-minute to change all the air-handling units to bring in more fresh air once guidance on best practices was clearer. They rearranged the workstations so that they were checkerboarded in contrast to each other for social distancing, a feat that also required adapted space planning on the fly.

The barn also needed insulation, and not just for heating and cooling, but for sound dampening. “Imagine Saturdays during college football games, with people just spilling out onto the roof deck where there are TVs and you can host parties,” he said. Acoustic foam was essential, he said. “It's a huge budget element as well. We use a product called K-13 that is sprayed in the ceiling that is really, really good at stopping the echo and making it a really nice space to be in.”

Luckily, some of the charming natural elements of the older building became both aesthetic advantages and cost breaks for the client, Synecdoche and its partner NBS Commercial Interiors. Leaving the brick exposed, for example, ended up being part of the budget decisions, Smith explained. “But also, instead of just putting up a flat drywall or something, we get this interesting warm texture throughout the building.”

Synecdoche also got crafty with its own custom fittings and finishes, which helped save costs as well. “We have a fabrication shop in-house that we do custom elements for,” Smith explained. “In the reception area, for example, we drew in the wall and the curved shape for the welcome desk, but we actually fabricated the steel panels. We really like to play with a lot of different elements and different materials.”

Lighting was another area that called for a custom solution, he continued. With a lack of natural lighting on one side of the building, Synecdoche created a double-sided, translucent wall. “We actually designed it so that these light strips are inside the stone wall with a plastic polycarbonate cover on it. So, the walls just have this glow to them instead of just being a typical surface.”

Another strikingly creative element, perhaps the most eye-catching of all, is the custom exterior wall mural sparked by Synecdoche and sponsored by both the building owner and the client. Synecdoche CEO and Principal Lisa Sauve had been leading the murals project of a program in Ann Arbor called Art in Public at the time, and when the team approached the building owner about doing a mural on the building, Smith said they were “all for it.”

“I think we picked the right artists for Clinc and for the building — a more progressive artist, Taylor White, who had worked in this ambiguous style that has a digital feel. The mural dictated the decision to paint the entire building with a dark backdrop to let the art pop.”

As custom as the whole building is, however, it’s still extremely flexible for future uses, Smith continued. Clinc AI, though it wanted to nest in its own space, is like many startups in that it may expand or contract as time goes on. And with the return-to-office slower than expected, office space requirements are still a big unknown. With only the essential furniture pieces like rolling tables and whiteboards in place, the space can be used in a coworking style now, he said, while the ongoing pandemic keeps the full return of workers pending.

And apart from the two distinct units of the building being demarcated, the first and second floors can also be split into separate spaces for multiple users. “The owner knows tech offices don’t last forever —and we initially worked with them to say, ‘okay, in the future, another tenant may take the second floor;' and in that case, they’d be able to split it.”