Rehab to include solar collectors, 'green' features

Brothers Dan and Mike Chiles, vice president of marketing and general manager, respectively, for Watts Radiant, formed Emdee Co. LLC in May. They purchased the 18,000-square-foot former Jerry’s Antique Mall building at 309 South Ave. June 9 from Jerry Lawrence for $347,000.

Lawrence had owned the building since 1990.

“What we’re going to try to do is the first LEED-certified building rehab in Springfield,” Dan Chiles said.

Green features under consideration include radiant floor heating, solar collectors on the roof, a “green roof” with plants growing on it, air-to-air ventilators for fresh air and a rainwater collection system.

“And one thing that Springfield hasn’t seen before, we think on the back side, where we have a small number of parking spaces, we’d like to double the number of parking spaces by putting in Springfield’s first car elevators,” Chiles added.

He thinks potential tenants will be enthusiastic about the building’s amenities.

“But we can’t have something that looks like the Jetsons,” he said. “It’s got to look like something that a Civil War veteran would’ve felt comfortable looking at.”

The front of the building will be restored to resemble how it originally looked when it was built.

“It had six beautiful columns and those were removed sometime in the 1950s, we think, and we’re going to put it back like it was in 1881,” Chiles said.

Jack Ball & Associates is the architect and Elite Construction LLC is the general contractor on the project.

Katherine Dowdy of Heritage Research Co. in Ozark is providing information for the historical aspects of the restoration.

Elite Construction has removed the building’s front, which Chiles said was added to the building in the 1950s, and gutted the inside of the building.

The demolition began in late August, said Bill McNabb, owner of Elite Construction, adding that the project took about four weeks to complete.

McNabb anticipates starting the renovation project in November.

The main floor of the building will be for commercial use.

“We’re researching what sort of retail is really needed in downtown Springfield,” Chiles said.

“On the upstairs we’re thinking of either doing apartments or condominiums, (but) leaning toward condos because we’re going to have secure parking in the back, a roof deck and storage below for seasonal stuff, and we’re going to have all these other interesting amenities in this building – the fresh air, the radiant floor heating,” he said. “We’re even thinking about using some water source heat pumps, actually putting in wells in the parking lot and using geo-thermal for both heating and cooling.”

The building, McNabb added, is one of a kind.

“The building itself is real unique in its design. There’s not another one like it in Springfield,” he said.

“We have some photographs that Dan (Chiles) found from the 1880s when the building was first constructed. Now we’re going to move forward with trying to maybe not exactly replicate the storefront, but have a storefront that looks more similar to what it originally was than what was there when we started.”

A completion date for the project hasn’t been selected.

“I’d like to think we’re in the six-month to one-year timeframe,” Chiles said.

This is the first project of its type for the Chiles brothers.

“We were building contractors for many years before we got into the radiant floor business. We’re used to building things, but we’ve never done a historical rehab,” Dan Chiles said.

Plans have not yet been approved and a dollar amount for the project hasn’t been estimated.

Going green

LEED-certified buildings cost about 1.8 percent more to construct than a conventional building, Chiles said.

“I don’t know if that’s the case for an historic building. Our challenge here is going to be to see if we can do all of this great stuff and yet not add significantly to the cost of the building because, after all, our rates have to be somewhat in accord with what everybody else charges in Springfield, even though we hope to have amenities that, frankly, are unique,” Chiles said.

The Chiles brothers were interested in working toward LEED-certification since Watts Radiant has supplied equipment for alternative energy projects at Crowder College and the University of Missouri-Rolla.

“We’re already in that business of supplying heating, ventilation, air conditioning equipment, radiant panel cooling and now, having supplied it for years and seeing what people have done with it, we really have a chance to do it on our own project,” Chiles said.