A $5 million renovation has turned a once vacant cornerstone of the North George Street corridor into a state-of-the art office space and brought another major employer back to York’s downtown area.
LSC Design, an architecture and engineering firm, will employ more than 50 full-time employees at its new headquarters in the former Thos. Somerville Co. building at 320 N. George St., said Sarah Wortman, director of business development for the company.
The 47,000 square-foot space also includes room for two to three other tenants — slots Robert Kinsley II, president of the company, hopes will be taken up by a bar, restaurant or other local firms.
After more than a decade of operating at the edge of the city’s limits, Kinsley said he wanted to bring the company back to York’s core where it could play a larger role in the community.
“We paid city taxes, but we didn’t get any of the benefits,” Kinsley said.
Now, the company plans to open its innovative space up to nonprofits, local artists and others as a spot for fundraisers and showcases.
“We want to get as much use out of it as possible,” Kinsley said.
The building’s design lends itself to collaboration, whether its with the public or among its employees.
The large, open entryway was created as an area to hold large gatherings. A drop-down big screen descends to four feet above the floor, and a wide staircase doubles as a “rampitheater” — a walkway and seating area, Wortman said.
Work spaces, with low partitions and bench-style desks, are meant to encourage team members to exchange ideas, Wortman said. What she calls “touchdown areas” — or clusters of group seating — dot the entire office, offering spaces to work creatively, and even upper-level employees work in three-walled alcoves, allowing for visibility and easy access.
A former plumbing supply warehouse, the building has retained much of its original character, including exposed metal beams, brick walls and other markers of its industrial past.
The effort to salvage as much of the existing site as possible will help the site earn LEED certification, a program that is used to rate green buildings, at the highest level, Wortman said.
Completion of the project is another key step in a plan to redevelop the area of the Northwest Triangle, which languished as an underused brown field for years before the city mounted a concerted effort to rehabilitate the site about 10 years earlier.
The site has long been a part of the city’s vision for the acreage, but Thomas Conley, vice president of operations for LSC, said the company was forced to put work on hold after the recession hit.
The result, however, was a better final product, Conley said.
“Our goal was to do as little to the building as possible,” he said. The design process was like getting to know a spouse: “the longer we spent with the building, the more we understood who it wanted to be.”
Who rakes the compost?
The new headquarters of LSC Design at 320 N. George St. includes a number of features to decrease the building’s carbon footprint, said Sarah Wortman, director of business for the company. One of those features is composting toilets.
Waste from the second-floor toilets is deposited in a composter on the ground floor, which will produce fertilizer for the building’s outdoor landscaping, Wortman said.
But the compost has to be raked once a month.
So who gets that job?
Since it was his idea to install the toilets, Wortman said the president of the company, Robert Kinsley II, has volunteered.
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