Opening up the Patient
From an architectural standpoint, offices are typically easier to convert to residential or hotel programs because they are designed as “core and shell” open floors. “Office floors are meant to be open and reconfigurable, so it’s easy to go from a blank slate layout and then put walls where we want,” says JPA Intern Architect Toni Cliett, who worked directly with Halverson on 230 Peachtree. But 50 years of tenant fit-outs, modifications, and upgrades yielded inconsistent existing conditions from floor to floor (and, in some cases, from office to office). Many of the alterations had never been documented and the basic systems JPA thought it could use as part of the base building infrastructure needed to be excised and replaced, Halverson says.
When converting from office to hotel, architects design around existing interior load-bearing walls or plumbing. The challenge arises when the building typology changes from all-office to mixed-use. This involves the strategic insertion of plumbing, electrical, and mechanical elements into an infrastructure that was designed for much less, with risers and drains and access, all of which need to disappear and look seamless, Halverson explains. In the case of 230 Peachtree, JPA needed to update the existing outdated base building equipment for the upper floors that remained as office space while completely changing the building systems for the lower floors 2 through 9 that the firm converted to the Hotel Indigo. “In a way, it’s kind of like a patient,” Halverson describes. “You evaluate the health and status of your patient—can it sustain all of the stuff we’re going to do to it? And when you do open it up, you’re going to find things. It’s important for our office, that when we do anything like this, it has to look seamless and brand new, so you can’t tell where we opened the patient.”
In the midst of all that, JPA had to work around existing office tenants and minimize disruption to business operations. The group initially planned to build hotel rooms on floors 2 through 12, and office on floors 14 through 27. But the Atlanta Passport Agency, which has a relatively long-term lease on the 10th floor, did not want to budge. Given the high-security nature of the operation, that floor is not a typical office bay, so it would have been very expensive to move them, Pinkham says. Despite having three fewer floors, the team managed to build out 206 keys, which was still close to their target number. Should the agency decide to move in the future, JPA set up the building infrastructure in such a way that they could expand the hotel down the road if they choose.
The elevator bays posed another set of challenges. The firm had to add three elevators (two passenger and one service) and extend down an existing elevator. “Hotels have a lot of service traffic for housekeeping and engineering, and offices have deliveries, mail, and engineering, so we extended one of the high-rise elevators to stop on all of the hotel floors, where before it only started on level 14 and went to 27,” explains Ali Streetman, construction project manager at Portman Holdings.
They also didn’t want to mix office tenants with hotel guests for security and operational reasons, so they separated the banks so each population can board the elevators in their respective lobbies. “We want to keep the office tenants and hotel occupants separated—you don’t need to cross the populations, especially with the passport office having a constant stream of visitors,” Streetman says.
A guest may wonder why she has to take a shuttle elevator in the hotel lobby to floor 2, and then transfer to the low-rise elevator to access the guest floors. But it’s all a part of the John Portman experience. In Hotel Indigo’s second floor lounge area, a mural wall may catch a visitor’s eye before heading to her guestroom. On closer inspection, it is a series of zoomed in architectural details of Portman’s buildings that express themes through time, form, scale, color, and materiality. Portman used a similar tactic in the SunTrust Plaza Garden Offices, where JPA and Portman Holdings reside, so employees get to experience the sun-filled atrium before getting on a second elevator to their destination. “For Mr. Portman, it’s more about the experience than what your end goal is,” Halverson explains.
