BRIOHN BUILDING CORPORATION honored by the Milwaukee Business Journal in their 2010 Real Estate Awards
TAPCO (Traffic and Parking Control Co. Inc.)- Best Renovation: Industrial: Second Place
Brown Deer, WI., March 5, 2010
Talk about unique design elements.
It’s not often that an architect gets to incorporate blinking traffic lights, reflective yellow tape and streetscape signs into an office and industrial building renovation.
Unless the client is TAPCO- Traffic and Parking Control Co. Inc.- which manufactures and sells all things traffic and parking safety.
Having outgrown its third building- a landlocked site in Elm Grove – TAPCO retained architect Phillip Katz to help the global company relocate into a renovated, upgraded facility that would more than double its space.
The end result at TAPCO’s new location on West Brown Deer Road achieved not only the company’s business operational needs but also highlighted its unique products.
Perhaps the most visible change is a new showroom that displays for sale products ranging from traffic cones and flares to harp street lamps and decorative road signs. Yellow road tape marks a street across the showroom floor. Clients can view an interactive video screen and sit at tables and chairs built out of stop signs.
One showroom wall is covered with windows that give customers a peek into the adjacent plant where blinker lights and other items are being manufactured.
“We’re getting all kinds of raves about the showroom,” company co-owner John Kugel said. “Everybody who comes in here just loves it.”
There are other creative touches. Four administrative offices are set around an octagon-shaped common area. Office departments are identified by streetscape and other way-finding signs built by TAPCO. Even the carpet has subtle red, yellow and green hues.
But perhaps more important, the renovation vastly improved TAPCO’s sign shop, adding natural light, higher ceilings and better ventilation to the area where paint fumes can dominate, said Katz, founder and principal of Phillip Katz Product Development LLC, Mequon.
The renovation also more than doubled TAPCO’s square footage from about 58,000 in Elm Grove to about 130,000 in Brown Deer, said Andrew Bergholz, company vice president of sales and grandson of the company’s founder Raymond Bergholz.
Kugel praised efficiency upgrades Briohn Building Corp. made to the building’s plumbing, heating and ventilation systems. The contractor’s meticulous planning moved TAPCO’s operations over two days last July so the company “barely missed a beat” during its busy summer construction sales season. Kugel added.
The $6 million project included $5.1 million in industrial revenue bonds the state Department of Commerce used to persuade TAPCO against accepting offers to relocate to other states such as North Carolina.
TAPCO has offered its two large conference rooms for use by groups including local first-responders, an investor’s forum and the Wisconsin Federal Prime Contractor’s Task-Force. Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker delivered his annual state-of-the-county address in the showroom in January.
TAPCO’s facility at 800 Wall St. in Elm Grove is up for sale.
The Brown Deer site had been vacant for more than five years before TAPCO acquired it, said Jesse Thyes, village of Brown Deer community services director.
“They did a fantastic job updating the building and ground overall,” Thyes said. “The inside is gorgeous.”
-Lisa Sink
BRIOHN BUILDING CORPORATION honored by the Milwaukee Business Journal in their 2010 Real Estate Awards
EREHWON MOUNTAIN OUTFITTER- Best New Development Retail: First Place
Glendale, WI., March 5, 2010
Its name is “nowhere” spelled backward, but Erehwon Mountain Outfitter has made a major jump forward as a new addition to the Bayshore Town Center. The Arlington Heights, Ill-based supplier of outdoor gear opened its fifth location in Glendale last October and already is ahead of its revenue projections by nearly 30 percent.
“Business has been good,” said Rudi Mayer, general manager of Erehwon Mountain Outfitter. “We are really a very small company; it’s the best looking store we have.”
Mayer explained that the store’s exterior design is a strong representation of his company’s product.
“Our other locations are in strip centers where everything looks the same, but at Bayshore the exterior makes a lot of people want to come in and see what is there,” he said.
Founded in 1972, Erehwon’s other locations are in the Chicago area where it operates three stores, and it has one location in the Madison area.
“As soon as we saw the exterior drawings (for the Bayshore location) and where it would be located in relation to the mall and the highway, we were sold,” said Mayer, noting that the Glendale location could soon be the company’s highest volume store.
The space where the store was built is connected to a parking garage. The $900,000 renovation paid for by Erehwon and Bayshore Town Center owner Steiner & Associates transformed the look of the structure by carrying the front façade to the full height of the parking deck.
“It was a parking garage with a store in it, and now it is a store disguising a parking garage,” said Nelson Williams, vice president of Briohn Building Corp., the Brookfield general contractor for the project. “When you drive by (on I-43), the first thing you see isn’t a parking garage, it’s a three-story retail façade that invites you in to explore the rest of the shopping center.”
A timber canopy on the exterior of the building is carried inside with trellises used throughout the store representing the back-to-nature feel of the business.
“The storefront really needs to set the customer’s expectation before they go in,” said Chris Jaeger, general manager of Bayshore Town Center. “If you walk into the store, I’m proud of the fact that the interior is representative of the exterior.”
One of the major challenges for the project was the aggressive schedule required to open before the holiday shopping season.
“It required great teamwork and cooridination amongst the various members of the design and construction teams as well as the mall owner and tenants,” said Williams. “From an interior perspective, we grew the footprint; the space for retail was made larger to fit the tenant’s needs.”
Williams said the team also added huge glass windows to allow for more signage and opportunities for people to view the products inside.
“It encourages people to get outdoors and participate in recreation,” Williams said. “It celebrates the fact that when you get 16 inches of snow you can just buy some snowshoes and enjoy the weather.”
-Wendy Strong
BRIOHN BUILDING CORPORATION honored by the Milwaukee Business Journal in their 2010 Real Estate Awards
GE HEALTHCARE DISTRIBUTION FACILITY- Best Public/Private Partnership: First Place
Muskego, WI., March 5, 2010
With construction of a 486,000 square-foot distribution facility, GE Healthcare became the first tenant of the Muskego Commerce Center, which is on former farmland that now serves as a new gateway into the city.
The $17.1 million building, located on 35 acres south of West College Avenue and Moorland Road, is owned and operated by Cudahy-based Ace World Wide and Steinergroup Cos. IT opened in April 2009 allowing GE Healthcare to consolidate 10 distribution buildings it leased in Ace Industrial Park in Cudahy into one facility, said Mark Otto, the firm’s real estate manager. The project resulted in 125 Ace employees being shifted from Cudahy to Muskego.
“By having a facility the size of 486,000 square feet, it allows us to have an awful lot of product,” he said. “And it allows us to lay out the floor plan the best way possible.”
The facility is located in a tax incremental financing district that provided about $5.4 million in city financing for the project. The funding helped pay for infrastructure improvements in the College Avenue/Moorland Road business corridor, including a new water tower, four-lane road extension, water lines, signage, lighting and landscaping, according to Jeff Muenkel, the city’s director of community development.
Muenkel said the facility sets new modern architectural standards in the developing corridor, which will soon be home to a 156,400-square-foot Wal-Mart Supercenter.
“It really created an identity for coming into that part of Muskego,” he said.
Construction on the distribution facility began in spring 2008 but was soon halted after the region was hit with torrential rains in June of that year, said Bob Goehner, president of Brookfield-based Briohn Building Corp., general contractor and architect for the project.
“It really made it difficult to get things rolling,” he said. “We essentially lost a month because of the weather.”
Despite the poor weather early on, Goehner said workers were able to make up the time and construction on the large project went smoothly. He said the city was good to work with and contractors pulled together to get the project completed on time. Briohn’s design/build approach also helped to simplify the construction process, he said.
“It would have been difficult in a more traditional situation,” Goehner said.
The large facility was positioned in such a way to downplay its size to passersby. The building is located on a hillside in the far northwest corner of the 55-acre site and is buffered by a 30-foot-high retaining wall. In addition, features such as truck docks, dumpsters and an employee patio area are screened from the public.
Steinergroup president Jason Steiner said the design of the building is appealing and adds to what he called an “above-average industrial park atmosphere.”
“There’s some aesthetic to it and I think GE appreciated that,” he said.
There are four other developable parcels in the business park. Steiner said his company is in negotiations with two other firms to occupy parcels.
“This is a project we’re extremely proud of,” he said. “It’s probably the project we’re the most proud of, and we had great partners.”
-Andy Turner