Title: Hartwell
Location of Proejct: Raleigh, NC
Project Completion Date: September, 2021
Firm Name: The Raleigh Architecture Co

Short Description: Hartwell is a post-war, neighborhood grocery repurposed as a dynamic retail and gathering concept by the founder’s granddaughter.

Stringent regulatory, permitting, and zoning requirements necessitated a creative conversion of existing interior space into an exterior entry court to accommodate new vertical circulation and avoid net area increases.

Materiality, color, and texture strike a contrast between the new elements clad in perforated aluminum, the existing painted masonry shell, and the rescued cedar panels from the original produce cooler.

Service program anchors the rear of the building, allowing a continuous transparent experience through retail/gathering, entry court, and streetside patio to the sidewalk.

Architect's Statement: Hartwell is an adaptive re-use, renovation, and addition project where frugality, ingenuity, and pride in family linage served as the team’s north-star. The building is adjacent to the historic Boylan Heights neighborhood between Dorothea Dix Park and the Warehouse District in the southwest quadrant of downtown Raleigh.

As a non-compliant structure impacted by regulatory, sanitary, stormwater, and river-buffers, superfluous form and interior program was removed to accommodate new vertical circulation and roof-deck program within the existing footprint. Reallocating the previous interior square feet as roof deck prevented net area increases and maintained the current parking count, both triggers for a lengthy site permitting process and significant scope and construction cost increases. This decision simultaneously, afforded area for implementing an exterior stair, a necessary direction to satisfy the budgetary targets.

The existing masonry shell was altered, perforated, and simplified to anchor the building, garner daylight, frame the entry, and support new programmatic uses and structural loading. A corrugated, perforated aluminum morphs in transparency as the southern sun tracks across the building and renders as fully transparent when lit from inside in the evening; the material is dynamic as the building’s use. The vertical orientation was selected to reinforce the stair as an object inserted into the shell and to further distinguish the new element by overtly countering the horizontality of the masonry coursing.

To provide a flexible retail and gathering space to support a coffee shop, bar, private events, weekend markets, comedy, yoga, and day-to-day retail, the service spaces were grouped away from the street. This ordering system allows for a physical and visual uninhibited spatial experience from the interior to the sidewalk, inviting the neighborhood back into the reimagined concept.