|
Bank's New Site Redesigned
Jun 26, 2009 (The Modesto Bee - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) --
Just ugly.
That's how architect Joseph Smith described the old office building at 1213 13th St. in downtown Modesto.
"There was no style to that structure," said Smith, vice president of Architecture Plus Inc.
It has plenty of style now.
A nine-month renovation has transformed the two-story building into a sleek beauty that will become Yosemite Farm Credit's new Modesto office. The financial institution's 16 appraisers and lenders will move in next week.
"We wanted to do something with clean lines and simple. It's contemporary in a way, but timeless," said Smith, who worked closely with the bank's staff on the remodeling design.
"We virtually had to tear the building down to the skeleton, to the studs and foundation, to do it," said Smith, whose API office is next door. "Nothing from the old interior was left."
Besides the new look, the project improved the building's functionality. The original 1973 design, for instance, had only an outdoor staircase.
"There was no direct connection from the first floor to the second floor. You had to go up an exterior stairwell, then walk on the roof to get inside. It wasn't legal. It wasn't safe," Smith recalled. "We had to shore it all up because the roof was sagging and spongy."
An interior stairway was built, which added a couple of hundred square feet to the building. It now has about 8,187 square feet.
Modesto's Woodland Construction was the general contractor. Most of the subcontractors were from the Modesto area.
"We've been really pleased with the contractors," said Leonard Van Elderen, Yosemite Farm Credit's chief executive officer. "They've done a great job. It looks beautiful."
The financial institution's Modesto staff will move from their current office at 4216 Kiernan Ave., which they've rented for five years.
"We ran out of space on Kiernan," Van Elderen explained. "We wanted to get back to downtown Modesto in a centralized facility."
They began looking into buying a building in downtown during summer 2005, but Van Elderen said "there wasn't nearly as much inventory for sale then as there is now."
They agreed to purchase the 13th Street building from the United Cerebral Palsy Association for more than $1.2 million. That deal closed in August 2007, but the agency leased back the office building for an additional year.
"We may have bought near the peak of the market," Van Elderen acknowledged. "But it was the location that we were interested in, and we plan to be in there for years to come."
Yosemite Farm Credit has been around since 1916. It is an agricultural financing cooperative that is owned by its borrowers and is part of the national Farm Credit System.
With $1.4 billion in loan assets, it serves more than 5,000 customers in Stanislaus, Merced, Tuolumne, Mariposa and Fresno counties. It provides real estate and commercial loans, revolving lines of credit, crop insurance and other financial services to the agribusiness community.
Van Elderen said Yosemite Farm Credit has grown substantially the past five years, expanding its staff from about 81 employees to its current 91 employees.
It is headquartered in Turlock. Besides Modesto, it has branches in Turlock, Oakdale, Patterson, Merced and Los Banos.
It has hired Smith to design a new Los Banos office, which will be built on Washington Avenue. Smith said that 4,370-square-foot office will look like a Craftsman-style house.
To see more of The Modesto Bee, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to
http://www.modbee.com Copyright (c) 2009, The Modesto Bee, Calif. Distributed by
McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email
tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax
to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave.,
Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.
[ Back To it.tmcnet.com's Homepage ]
|