Friday, January, 22, 2016
In October of last year, we wrote an extended Teardown Tuesday post about the demolition of the former William Cozart furniture manufacturing company.
Wake County
The warehouse at 319 S West Street in 1996
Located at 319 West Street in downtown Raleigh’s warehouse district and a stone’s throw from the new Union Station and the Dillon Supply Warehouse redevelopment, the former structure was first built in 1920. Back then, it was home to the Southern School Supply Company.
Five months later, the demolition is pretty much finished and a new site plan has been filed for its replacement: HQ Raleigh.
As we wrote in October, the downtown business incubator purchased the property at 319 West for $900,000 on February 4, 2015.
On February 9, HQ Raleigh announced its plans to expand their existing facilities at 310 S. Harrington Street into the space at 319.
Now that we’ve got our hands on the site plans for this expansion, let’s take a closer look and see what’s in store.
City of Raleigh
Site plans for the HQ Raleigh expansion
Unfortunately, the site plans don’t tell us a whole lot that we didn’t already know. They did confirm that the new building will be 50,000 square feet (when HQ Raleigh announced the expansion, it was described as “between 30,000-50,000 square feet) and that the property will require a sanitary sewer pump.
One odd item was that the development would require 40 off-street parking spaces, but the site plans indicate the zero will be provided. We’re not sure if this is due to existing parking availability at HQ Raleigh, but the new building will work to accommodate cyclists. In fact, there’s more details available on the bike parking than almost anything else:
There will be 15 spaces available, five “short-term” spaces near the front entrance under the overhang and 10 internal long-term spaces inside. The bike racks will be of the inverted U variety.
The property will also have a 1,219 square-foot outdoor open space area, which will include seven trees and 34 feet of seating. Yeah, that’s a weird way of putting it, but on the plans it’s described as 34 LF, which in construction parlance usually translates to linear feet. A couple of long benches maybe?
James Borden / Raleigh Public Record
The former site of the William Cozart Furniture Company
Like I said, there’s not a whole lot of details regarding the building’s interior, but thankfully, we were able to find out what kind of trees will be planted on the property. We know what kind of details our Development Beat readers like, and tree types for new developments are pretty much at the top of that list. Honestly, we should’ve led with this information.
There will be four Amur Maple “Flame” trees, four European Hornbean trees and three Italian Cypress trees. Hornbean, heh.
While HQ Raleigh initially anticipated opening this expansion sometime in the Spring of 2016, the fact that site plans are only now being filed makes us think construction might be starting a little later than next month. But who knows.
