Mixed-use construction: several uses, one structure, one schedule

The coffee shop on the ground floor has a lease that starts in March. The apartments above it lease up on their own curve through the summer. The office suite on two has a tenant who wants to move in before the fiscal year ends. All three sit on the same slab, share the same fire riser and draw from the same electrical service. That is a mixed-use job from the builder's chair: not one project, and not three, but one structure with three finish lines that have to be held at once.

What the shared bones cost

Stack the uses vertically and the structure, the risers, the fire protection and the mechanical shafts get built once for everybody. They are sized to the most demanding use in the stack, which means the residential life-safety requirements or the restaurant's exhaust and grease load can set the baseline for the whole building. An owner budgeting the retail portion alone is really budgeting a share of systems that another use defined. We break that out in pre-construction so each floor's number reflects what it is actually carrying, and so nobody discovers in month eight that the shell was never sized for a commercial kitchen.

Three calendars, one building

The lease at street level does not care when the units upstairs are ready, and the residential leasing plan does not care when the retail tenant's rent starts. If the building is run to one lead schedule, whichever use is not the lead absorbs the delay. Our approach is to sequence so the ground floor can reach its own certificate of occupancy while the upper floors are still in finishes, which takes deliberate planning of the risers, the fire alarm zones and the inspection order from the first week. A principal of the company is on the site through the whole stack and holds all three dates, because the person who priced the sequence is the one standing there when the inspector arrives.

When the uses are side by side instead of stacked

A horizontal mixed-use development, separate buildings on one large parcel, sequences more like a residential development. The site work comes first and has to serve every use on the plan: the grading, the detention, the utility mains sized for the restaurant and the apartments together. Once that is in, each building runs its own clock, which is simpler than a stacked building but only if the site package was designed for all of it at once. Our excavation and concrete crews are in-house, which lets us hold the site work to the date that the first vertical start depends on.

Fitting a new use into an old building

Some mixed-use projects begin as a single-use building that the neighborhood outgrew. Turning a former office lobby into ground-floor retail, or adding residential floors over an existing commercial base, means feeding new loads through systems that were sized for one occupancy decades ago. Structure, electrical service, plumbing stacks and egress all have to be checked against the new mix before the design is committed. This is renovation work as much as it is new construction, and it is where our interior build-out and PIP experience does the most good, because the finish and opening sequence of an occupied building is a different discipline from a greenfield start.

The owner's job is the date, not the drywall

Plan the uses as one building from day one, because the shared systems and the competing calendars do not separate cleanly no matter how the contracts are written. One builder responsible for the whole structure, with the owner of that company on site, is what keeps the coffee shop's March date from becoming the apartment building's problem.

If you are planning a project that stacks or sits more than one use on a single site, send over the drawings and the lease dates you are carrying. We will show you how the pieces sequence, and which one has to go first.