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Lofty Living In Silicon Valley
News, Information, Resources, Loft Listings
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Stories by Broderick Perkins, Executive Editor,
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Markethouse Lofts (above), offers interiors much like those carved out of New York's, Chicago's, San Francisco's commercial buildings, but was built from the ground up north of San Jose's Japantown area where residential loft developments are on the leading edge of a new residential district.
Update: Lofty Living Migrates West > > >Lofts carved out of old commercial buildings and new lofts built from the ground up are on the leading edge of housing developments out West.
Update: Turning Down Loft Sound > > >Loft dwellers are discovering they have an interior design dilemma that's unique to living in wide open spaces. Acoustical design with both form and function help bring lofty sounds down to earth.
Update: Hardwood Flooring Lifted To Lofty Level > > >You never realize how much carpeting is too much until you have carpeting without walls and doors to break it up and shut it out.
McLoft: Faux Urban Lofts For The 'Burbs > > >Suburban single-family homes don industrial-style chic inspired by the urban loft but delivered with the trappings of suburbia.
Update: Steel Framed Park Townsend Comes With Live-Work Lofts > > >North of downtown San Jose, amid the growing expanse of rising wood-framed infill housing, the glint of metal framing catches the eye.
What's A Loft? > > >RealFacts, a rental market monitor that tracks rents and occupancy rates, is adding lofts to its database of rental units -- from studios to three-bedroom townhomes -- it tracks for rents and occupancy rates.
Silicon Valley Loft Listings
If you have a loft for sale or for rent let us know and we'll link to your listing to help bring loft buyers and sellers together. Email news@deadlinenews.com and put "Loft For Sale" in the subject line.
• Santa Clara -- Walnut Factory (Formerly Zlofts)
• MarketHouse -- Japantown
• MarketHouse -- Japantown
• MarketHouse -- Japantown
• MarketHouse -- Japantown
• NEW! Silicon Valley Lofts & Condos
• Lofts Unlimited -- North Bay -- Various
• San Jose Downtown Living -- New, Resales
THE exposed HVAC system bangs around a bit and it get's a little warm at 18 feet if Terry Theisen turns off the HVAC to hear himself think for his consulting business, but from a live-work perspective the loft he rents is one of his best business deals.
Theisen, 45, lives and works his Consynity consulting firm in one of the new lofts carved out of the historic Walnut Factory in Santa Clara. The $2.15 per square foot cost is less than half the $5.50 he was paying for Class A office space in downtown San Jose.
And the place is cool. An upper-mezzanine bedroom-lounge area accessed by an iron spiral stair case is suspended 10 feet above his open kitchen, office and living spaces below.
"There are few places in the South Bay where you can get the industrial city feel in a space that's unlike anything else. When my son visits my office he can stay over. I think they did a good job," said Theisen.
"They" is Willis & Co. a 10-year old Santa Clara developer and property management firm that redeveloped the Santa Clara Walnut Growers Association's walnut-processing factory on Lafayette Street into 43 live-work lofts.
ZLofts, much like those found carved out of New York, Chicago, San Francisco and other cities with an inventory of old commercial buildings, is on the leading edge of a handful of recent loft developments in Silicon Valley.
Lofts, room-free living spaces, typically carved out of commercial and industrial buildings, historically provided housing for artists, the avant garde and other bohemian types who weren't a slave to the single-family home design and needed to put an affordable roof over their heads -- way over their heads.
True lofts typically have soaring ceilings of 18 feet or more with a mezzanine structure or platform forming a second level over a section of the main floor below. They often retain the industrial look of the original building with exposed beams, ducts, and plumbing as well as concrete flooring and corrugated steel or masonry walls, all often accessed by a freight elevator.
In Silicon Valley, with so few commercial buildings available for loft fitting that isn't too cost prohibitive -- what with seismic retrofit requirements -- most current loft projects are being built from scratch often without the raw retro feel of a true loft -- a sacrilege practice to loft aficionados.
"Generally it's just a marketing schtick. The original concept was for artists who needed tall windows for light to paint. Now it's a marketing concept. Some things called lofts just barely qualify," said Mark Ritchie, of Ritchie Commercial in San Jose.
Ritchie recently ended a venture, London Lofts, to market and sell lofts in Oakland's Jack London Square and other areas with a larger stock of commercial property.
"We don't have the existing stock of older buildings and as a new development lofts aren't typical because they don't allow you the density you need as a developer," Ritchie said.
Lofty costs
Because of the minuscule supply, lofts that are coming on line are snatched up as soon as the dust clears at rents and prices starving artists likely can't afford.
Barry Swenson Builders gutted and rebuilt the old Borcher Brothers Building on First Street adjacent to its Ryland Mews condo/townhome complex a year ago and quickly sold 15, 1,060 square foot lofts for approximately $350,000 each -- a relative bargain given the cost of building specialty housing.
Perched atop the 40-acre upscale mixed-use suburban Santana Row development on Stevens Creek Boulevard across from Westfield Valley Fair, is the "X" framed metal beam framing of as many as 100 lofts ranging in size from 700 to 1,200 square feet. The larger lofts will likely rent for $3,000 a month.
With 18-foot ceilings and outdoor decks, some lofts will offer views of the Los Gatos hills in the distance, while others will over look the shopping streets of a community being built from the ground up.
"It will have a 24-hour lifestyle. The feel for residents will be like a club," said Anthony Flanagan, director of development for the community's Rockville, MD-based developer, Federal Realty Investment Trust.
The costs of lofts can be more affordable when they become live-work locations for small businesses.
Kent Villarreal's 1,520 square foot live-work ZLoft rents for $3,800, but will double as his home and as an office furniture and equipment showroom for his Office Systems and Interiors business.
"It just worked out for me perfectly. My office used to be in Burlingame and more and more of my customers were in San Jose and it didn't make sense because I lived in Belmont and had an apartment there," he said.
The cost of his loft equals what he was paying for his apartment and previous office space, but he's removed a the cost and stress of a commute from his daily grind.
"It's about the same, but I can probably write more off (in taxes), so it probably works a little better. Basically, it's just a total solution," Villarreal said.
The best of both loft worlds also will face off near the Compaq Center when the San Mateo-based The Castle Group completes conversion of the 96-year old, Del Monte brick cannery complex across Bush Street from Avalon Bay Communities' new Avalon at Cahill Park complex.
Thirty-eight of the 218 rental units will be lofts at the Avalon project, which is being constructed with brick and corrugated metal siding to mesh with the industrial look of the area, "sort of like the Arena," says Jackie Todesco, Avalon's development manager.
Lofts ranging up to 1,500 square feet will likely rent for $2,000 to $3,200, but the rents aren't firm until the project is complete and the market dictates true rents, Todesco said.
"We are building from scratch and you don't get the ambiance of the old feel of lofts, but I think what people enjoy is that everything is brand new without the creaks you'll hear in the other building," she added.
Get your creaks across the street at the Del Monte Plant No. 51, but not until sometime after 2004 when San Mateo-based Castle Group plans to offer lofts for sale along with flats and townhomes in the reused buildings. Prices were originally expected to range from $300,000 to more than a half million for the more authentic loft homes, but that was back in 2002 and in late 2004 the project was still not complete.
Plant No. 51 is a four building complex and one of only three remaining former California Fruit Packers Association (Calpak) cannery sites in San Jose. The association ultimately adopted the Del Monte name. Castle plans to keep the four buildings largely intact and hope to preserve many of the plant's historic features, including heavy timbers and beams, exposed brick, and vaulted spaces.
Another historic Del Monte brick building also will house lofts. The old Del Monte warehouse in San Jose's Japantown at Eighth and Jackson streets is on a site where Phoenix, AZ developer Picerne Real Estate Group is constructing Esplanade Apartments a housing and retail complex.
Picerne is refurbishing the 100-year-old warehouse with 22 rental studios and lofts ranging from 635 square feet to 1,184 square feet and renting from $1,955 to $3,245. Six of the ground floor lofts will be live-work spaces.
"Six of the ground floor units units will have fenced back yards and so we will accept pets with certain breed and size restrictions," said Brian Gagan, vice president of property management.
The Japantown area is becoming "the" loft enclave which includes the now sold-out MarketHouse Lofts at 350 E. Mission St. (one unit, purchased for $400,000 late in 2003 was on the March 2004 resale market for for $475,000!) and, under construction (in March 2004) next door, fronting the newly expanded Bernal Park, the 800 N. 8th Street condo complex is topped off with 22 loft units. Both projects by Regis Homes back up against the railroad tracks where the freight train lumbers by the remaining commercial/warehouse buildings on the other side of the track three times a week -- much like big-city living. There's also Pulte Home's Mariani Square in Japantown.
Lofty interior designs
 MarketHouse Lofts unit interior >>>
Once loft residents get past lofty rents, high purchase prices and the costs to heat and cool their voluminous homes, they'll also have to grapple with interior design issues more conventional homes don't present.
Live-work residents may prefer high ceilings and large volumes of space as conducive to creative thinking, meetings and the flow of work and likely will be content to leave the loft be, says Lisa Gonzalez, president and CEO of Santa Clara's Design Alternatives, the company that provided architectural designs for ZLofts.
"The beauty of a loft space is there is so much flexible use. It can be for a business or your home or however you intend to use it. In traditional Andy Warhol loft spaces you needed that extra volume for oversized canvasses and art," Gonzalez said.
But large, open spaces can feel cold and uninviting without the right touches, says Sarah Susanka, a progressive architect who is teaching builders to think inside the box with a set of principles that reverse the bigger-is-better approach to new home building.
"The kinds of ideas I talk about are applicable no matter the size of the space you have," says Susanka, who spends her time between homes in Minneapolis, MN and Raleigh, NC.
"The problem is that comfort has almost nothing to do with how big a space is. It is attained, rather, by tailoring our houses to fit the way we really live, and to the scale and proportions of our human form," she added.
She says real lofts already come with mezzanines' lower ceilings, a technique that helps break up and define space without losing it's use. Darkening a high ceiling or a portion of it, adding texture to the ceiling or both can further help manipulate a loft's towering sense of scale.
The darkening and texture makes the ceiling appear "heavier" and not as high or tall, she explains. Of course any painting done in a rental unit may have to be reversed when it's time to vacate.
Lofts' large windows and related privacy issues are also a concern.
"When we see a window, we assume we also have to have the view, but a window lets in light. Rice paper screens or glass that modulates the view and lets the light come in is a better option than more conventional drapes that stop the light," said Susanka, author of "The Not So Big House" and "Creating The Not So Big House" by Taunton Books and Videos.
"People always go to the drape solution and they feel like they live in a cave. Use a translucent material for a much more habitable space," she added.
Susanka says loft dwellers can retain a loft's openness by rearranging furniture, suspending screens and blinds to create the illusion of walls without losing the space.
"And make the space engaging. Not so that you stop at every corner and go "Oh, that's cool." Create light to walk toward. For instance, if there isn't a window at the far end of a space, hang a lighted painting or light an object to attract attention and you are more likely to walk toward the light and be subconsiously engaged in the space," Susanka said.
• Broderick Perkins, executive editor of DeadlineNews.Com, has been a consumer and real estate journalist for more than 25 years. His award-winning work has appeared in major-market newspapers and leading realty Web sites.
• More Condo, Townhome, Loft Living Stories •
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