My client owns two existing buildings that abut one another. He plans to renovate and add onto both buildings. First floor will be retail - probably separate tenant on either side. Second and third floors will be residential. The retail space may be finished by the tenants; the residential spaces will be finished by my client. We can probably satisfy a 60 retail / 40 residential ratio with basement space that will likely be conditioned.
Questions:
1. Since the first floor will not be fitted out, should the entire building(s) be submitted as CS?
2. Since my client controls both buildings (they are both at least 50 years old) could we submit as one project? The buildings do not connect internally, but they have a party wall.
David Posada
Integrated Design & LEED SpecialistSERA Architects
LEEDuser Expert
1976 thumbs up
March 23, 2011 - 3:01 pm
For #1:In the past, most mixed-use buildings with residential above and ground floor retail have been NC. The retail space was often only built out as core and shell, which is fine with NC when more than 50 or 60% of the building is being built out and finished, in this case for residential units. A Tenant Improvement manual establishes guidelines for future retail TI's to encourage compliance with LEED goals, even though it may not be enforced as a requirement.
More recently, mid-rise residential projects have been given the option of pursuing LEED Homes for Mid-rise, which has some advantages over NC, but any ground floor retail is typically excluded from the project and not certified.
If the basement area is not included in the retail leases, you may be better off following the NC or Homes route and consider the building as more residential than retail. I've just never seen LEED-CS applied to a residential so not sure how well that would work. Is there any reason you'd prefer to pursue CS?
#2 I suspect GBCI may not let you register two buildings as one project if they have different mechanical systems. I think they'd encourage you to use the "Block" feature to share some credit information between the two projects to reduce redundancy. There have been other discussions about the Block feature on this site, with people having mixed results, so you may want to check on that. If the two buildings are essentially identical, you might have a case, but would probably need to confirm that with GBCI.
Hope that helps!
Nathan Lee
Project EngineerSGS Korea
56 thumbs up
November 3, 2011 - 2:52 am
In relation to this then, would the first floor retail space be "exempt" from meeting the NC specific requirements? IE Controllability of Lighting, Thermal Verification, etc?