December 15, 2025 — Meeting Transcript

Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the Planning Commission ARB for December 15th. If you have any electronic gadgets, please silence them at this time.

Ryan. Steve Lichtenfeld. Here. Helen DiFate.

Ryan. Steve Lichtenfeld. Here. Ellen DeFay.

Susan Buse.

Jean Marceau. Here. Darren Van't Hof. Here.

Jean Marceau. Here. Darren Van Hoff. Here.

Okay, we have minutes from the previous meeting on December 1st. Are there any changes? We have a motion.

I move to approve the minutes as submitted. Second.

All in favor? Aye. Okay. At this time, we have an open forum and I see we have one person who would like to speak and of course it's on a non-agenda item. So Mr. Albert, if you'd like to come up.

I don't know that it's a non-agenda item. I saw it under old business, actually, on the agenda. It's 8145 University Drive.

Well, that is an agenda item. Yes, it is. We reserve the open forum for non-agenda items. Okay. So if you don't mind, we'll call you back.

Okay.

Thank you. Okay, we will move into the business matters, and the first one on old business is 8145 University Drive, both a site plan review and an architectural review. And we'll get started with the staff report.

The subject property is located on the north side of University, just east of the street's intersection with North Forsyth. The property is zoned R2 and is in the Clayton Gardens Urban Design District. Property is developed with a two-story single family house. The project includes the demolition of the existing house and construction of a new single family house. This project was originally presented before the Plan Commission Architecture Review Board at their meeting on November 17th and was continued. Existing runoff calculations and drainage areas were revised. Both the existing and proposed conditions drain towards the street. The proposed conditions predict to see a 0.017 cubic foot per second decrease in stormwater runoff. The proposed conditions introduced two pop-up emitters in the front yard. This concentrated discharge could result in saturation of the surrounding area. The revisions propose the installation of a deep root native planting around the pop-up emiters to slow the flow of the water discharge. With proper upkeep, the proposed plantings may be sufficient to mitigate the overland flow to the public sidewalks. However, staff would like to make the applicant aware that the maintenance provisions that will govern the property beyond construction. Section 507.1 of the 2015 International Property Maintenance Code states drainage of roofs and paved areas, yards and courts and other open areas on the premises shall not be discharged in a manner that creates a public nuisance. Front yard trees were advised to remove conflicts with utility lines. Neighboring trees in poor condition are proposed to be removed. Two new Sargent Cherry trees are proposed on the east side of the house. These trees are unlikely to prosper given the confined location and abundance of clay soil. Staff recommend that alternative trees be selected. Staff recommend approval of the condition that the Sargent Cherry trees be revised to a tree that is more tolerant of clay soils.

Okay, the applicant have any further information?

I'm when they represent the builder and I just wanted to let you know, I do have my engineer and architect here and we do have a possible buyer for the House that's real interested so just to be aware. If you have any questions. Well,

we're glad to hear you have a potential buyer. But right now, we're going to talk about site plan review. So I think it would be good for the engineer to come up, explain the differences and the changes since the last time. And after that, we'll get into the commission.

Yes, my name is Henry Nguyen. I'm an engineer for the 8145 University of Detroit. Do you have any questions for me?

Can you update

us on what has changed? So I have updated the general area map, and I put some kind of small catch basin for the pump meter to slow down the water. So if you go to my page number two, see at the bottom corner, there is a little thing there.

Page two or four? We have four on the screen.

No, it's three, sorry. Should be 3.1, sorry. So I did put a little small catch basin in the river below the pump meter to slow down the water

any other changes you'd like to bring up

uh that's all i saw a change this one in the general error map that's all i have

for the site plan. Well, then we'll start with the commission. Jim, would you lead off? Sure, Steve.

Before we get into site plan, I just have a few general questions. Linda, you might be a little more suited for these Your projects, some of them are owned by MLM Manlin Development Group and some are owned by an LLC of the property address. I'm guessing in the cases of the ones that are owned by an LLC of the property address, there's probably some sort of sale agreement in place there and that takes place instead of Manlin owning the properties. Is that correct? Correct. Okay. As of noon today, two-year properties, 8136 University and 7632 Westmoreland show their 2024 property tax is unpaid. And that includes over $4,000 in fines and interest. Per Section 100.180 of the Municipal Code, no permit or approval shall be granted until the person or firm comes into compliance with applicable law. In this case, that would be the real estate taxes. So I think we can discuss site plan and architectural review, but I think we'll ultimately have to continue the vote until the taxes are paid.

I'll look into that. I don't think she got anything, but I'll look into that maybe. I don't pay the bills, but I'm wondering if maybe she didn't get a notice or look into it. But I will definitely find out and get them paid tomorrow.

Okay. Everyone's here, so I think it's still worthy to discuss these things. Sure. Relating to site plan review, so there were two issues that were brought up at least at the last meeting. One was best management practice for the... Henry, these are probably going to be more civil questions, so...

Revolving point of view.

So there were two issues that came up. It was for best management practice for the water runoff and resolving the tree conflicts. It looks like, as far as what's attached, the tree conflicts have mostly been resolved. Other than the fact that the staff had recommended the Sargent cherry trees be revised to a tree more tolerant of clay soils, I assume you guys wouldn't have a problem with that?

No.

Also, I don't think it ultimately matters in this case, but... Just to mention, only canopy trees count for the height mitigation. I know height mitigation was mentioned as far as planting those sergeant cherry trees on the side, but I don't believe those qualify as a canopy tree. It doesn't matter in this case because we still have other height mitigation strategies that were used, but I just wanted to bring that up. My concern is the... So basically... the last meeting we had kind of just these two pop-ups and there was nothing kind of slowing that flow of water uh the solution to that is these seven prairie drop seed plants um and i view that as definitely an improvement before but i still have concerns about the fact that all the water from the site is basically being piped to one concentrated area on the site um and certainly i think Those plants will help slow that some, but I think also the concern just at least for me personally is that We were talking about just a small number of plantings, especially at this point when it's still speculative development. A homeowner could just pull those out or go something. And we don't necessarily have a mechanism as in like a dry well or something else to be able to keep those plants in place to make sure that a BMP is used to slow that water to the street.

Okay. So that's why I go post. Look at my page number 3.1. So I got to have some kind of power meter. Where's the deadliest guy? Yes, right there. So I got, I need to go post some kind of cast patient with the power meter there to slow down the water. So that's airway right there. I'm sorry, can you try and explain again as far as like what I'm looking at? So I will post a, you know, from my power meter. It's not a power meter, it's a cash patient. And then at top, we had a power meter on the top one. And at the bottom one, I got the web of change right there. That has slowed down the water on that area for you before it shift low to the street.

I just, I guess, typically from this seat, what I see... something let's just say a little more elaborate of a solution in order to if if there's a large rain event which obviously we're seeing more and more of like I said once again all that water from the site is all being concentrated basically being piped from the back of the site the entire site the entire roof all to one concentrated area and basically the solution to that like I said is seven of these plants And that's it. I know personally, I would, I think I'd like to see a bit more elaborate of a solution, some sort of rain garden or something like that, that's tied to maybe a larger storm event to make sure that we can handle that. Certainly there's a decrease of water on the site, but it's a very small decrease. And like I said, I have concerns with a strategy that was used in

being able to achieve that. Okay. I think we can go vice a green garden to mitigate the water there. So, yeah, we can do that. Just go buy some kind of green garden area. Yeah, I

think something like that would be a big improvement over just the seven prairie drop seed plants.

Okay. We can do that. We can decide on that stuff. And then I do have a question about the, like, you know, because we have a very small area on the farm. So was it my garden too big and I had no room to put that on the farm? So can we put like close to the driveway? Can we do that?

As far as location, I think... there's still going to be a pop-up there. And I think you're limited as to where you can put your pop-ups and you could only be so close to the street. You can only be so close the drive and stuff like that. So I don't know how much leeway you would have in a rain garden just based on where your pop-ups are. I don't know that necessarily the location of your pop-ups would change. And if they do, that would be something more for staff to look at. Okay. Yes.

You look at my plan, they assume you have very limited fun area to put the PMP on. So it's very hard for me to put this on.

Yeah. Like I said, once again, from my perspective, when we see a plan like this, we're basically, as we discussed last time on the 17th, all of the water goes from the back to the front. Then we're capturing a large amount of that water just because the footprint of the house is so large. So now we're capturing all that water and we're concentrating that water in one distinct spot in the front yard. And those two pop-ups, if you look are right next to each other, um, that, that just creates an opportunity I think for, you know, uh, A lot of times in these plans, what we see is these different watersheds as far as going in different directions. And okay, we're able to limit that in multiple directions and use multiple strategies. But in this case, everything is being sent to one direct area. And then we have, we're relying on seven plants to slow that from sheeting across the sidewalk and the street. And certainly, I think, once again, it's a better strategy than nothing. But still, I have concerns. I have concerns that just these seven plants is going to do the job in capturing just the sheer amount of water that could come out of those pop-ups, especially in a heavy rainfall event.

Okay. We can do that. We can do design for the PMP for it.

Do you repeat that?

I can design the B&B for the project measurements for the stormwater to mitigate all the water there for you. I can do that.

Okay. Well, we'll go around also so there are more comments. Jim, did you have more? That's all for me. Chris?

I do, but more along the lines of the trees. And I'm wondering, first off, if either of you, Linda, might be better suited for this one, how the conversations with the neighboring homeowners were framed in terms of removing the two trees that are there and replacing them with the Sergeant Cherry trees that were proposed.

I did speak with him, and he was fine with it. He signed a letter. It was okay to take him out. And then he's got an issue with the tree in the back that I told him we would discuss once we get going. But he was okay.

Was the neighbor presented with alternatives to removal? So was there talk about root protection zones or was there a consideration given to different design elements in order to present, you know, protect those trees? About

keeping the trees? No, he was okay with taking them out. One of them is not doing very well and the other one's leaning so bad it couldn't be straightened up.

So I guess for the council, my concern is that I want to make sure that consent is not functionally kind of coerced in this case. And it's hard with a letter that's just signed. I'm wondering if we're setting a precedent that tree removal is justified by construction impact. rather than by design. And I'm also concerned that we're setting a precedent that likely damage becomes the workaround for it's cheaper than preservation standards. So I don't know if there's anything we necessarily need to do with that, but I am wondering in this instance how we go about making sure that that's not the case, that we're not having trees removed just because it's cheaper than building around the trees.

Actually, it would be more to take them down and we would save the trees if we can. But we were told by the arborist that most likely with the build, especially with the one that's leaning so bad that we wouldn't be able to save it. The other one is so large that its root capacity goes way into the other property and that it would be hard to save it.

How does staff, how do we determine or how do you determine whether something like that is

So whenever we get the plans from the applicant and we get feedback from our contracted landscape architect to inform how we present this to you guys. So the two trees that we're talking about, you'll see five and six here. This larger one, six, is in pretty poor condition with a lot of its root zone kind of in this footprint of the house. Any impact to this root zone is probably going to hasten the decline of this tree. And could eventually result in it falling. How's it going to fall? It's probably going to fall in the direction towards this house. Tree five is, it leans so far over the property line that it essentially would be going where this house is proposed to be. So, you know, if the outcome is this house gets built, both of those trees are going to be impacted to the extent that they're not going to survive. If they were to try to leave the trees, it's likely that those trees could collapse and they'd collapse in the house. So the staff recommendation to the applicant was to, there's kind of two options. You can either revise the plan such that they don't impact the trees at all or those trees can be removed.

Thank you. And I understand completely how changing from the Sergeant Cherry trees to the evergreens makes sense given Clayton's clay soil. Is there any concern about the height mitigation kind of in terms of the evergreens as opposed to the Yeah. Sergeant ones that were originally proposed.

Yes, but as addressed more in the architectural review section.

Okay. Okay.

All right. I have nothing further than

thank you. Thank you.

Aaron. Um, my comments are really the same as Jim's, which is really around, I mean, I'm not going to say anything new other than, and I don't know if it meets the criteria of the code. where that leaves us, but I would just tell you common sense would tell you that there is going to be a lot of flooding and a lot of ponding and a lot of water being concentrated and forced into one area. If there's a way to disperse it at all or dry wells or anything, it'll be a mess for the homeowner and for the neighbors.

Susan?

My primary concern is also with stormwater. I think you've addressed that, that you'll come back with a rain garden of some sort or handling that. And the other question I had is if the trees from the neighboring property will be damaged to the extent that they should be removed. And I don't know how this works. Is there any way to replace for the neighbor, the trees that you've taken away and replace their canopy that they've lost or anything else? Or how does I don't know that the code requires that, but if a property is being built that's going to require taking down two neighbors' trees, is there any way to provide that canopy back?

There's not necessarily something in our regulations that speaks to impacts to neighboring trees aside from making sure that there's tree protection fencing. However, that is something that

this

board could consider.

That would be my question. Would you be willing to work with the neighbor to replace the trees that you're taking away?

When I met with the homeowner, he thought on it for two days before I came back. And he was quick and easy to get rid of them. I don't know if he just doesn't want to maintain them anymore. He didn't mention getting them replaced, but it's certainly something we can offer up if he wants to replace them with the same.

Yeah, I mean, it's a concern with, you know, throughout the city to restore the canopy that we've lost and to get back to and to keep reaching toward our goals of canopy. So anytime we see trees coming down, that's that is a concern and something that we should try to address if we can. Absolutely. If you could pursue that, I think that would be a good idea.

Sure. We can do that. I can have a discussion with him and see if he wants something else put in there or maybe something in his backyard. Okay. He doesn't want it on the side of the house. That's something we could absolutely do. All right. Thanks. Okay. Thanks.

All of my concerns with regard to the drainage have been answered with the volunteering to do a rain garden. Yes. So if you're committing to that, then I have no questions.

I also am concerned about the water flow and the quantity. but if you can show us how the rain garden would work and alleviate a lot of the water that might be going into the public realm or anywhere else, I would go for it. My recommendation would be that we give you a chance to remedy it and come back, or with staff's approval, it might go straight to them. But before we go there, we do have a citizen who would like to comment. Charlie, are you on the site plan review or architectural or both?

I am here to talk about the water. I don't know where that fits in in your scheme. You're in the right place. Okay. You have a, and this is becoming a problem in Clayton generally. And I know that's not, this is not the proper forum perhaps to discuss that, but you're allowing overbuilding. And let me just say, I've lived in Clayton for 50 years. I've lived in this location for, I'm two doors away. I've lived there for 44 years. Water is a huge problem. And this particular developer, and I'm not going to, say too many bad things about them. They're building the house across the street. I don't know under which organization they're doing it, under an LLC or under his own name. And they've done a, as far as I'm concerned, a horrible job for the neighborhood. I don't trust them when they tell you they're going to put in plants, whichever one of you said they could pull them out I don't trust them to put in plants to solve a water problem. If you're going to allow them to build, first of all, I think the property should be shrunk. It is way too large. This is a very small piece of property. You can look at that and they're making almost the whole thing impervious. There is a water problem already in our neighborhood. from prior construction, this will exacerbate the problem. And the only way that I would feel comfortable as a neighbor there is if there is something that cannot be removed in any way, some drainage that cannot be removed by them or anyone else. Otherwise, I think you are allowing them to make a problem that Clayton has in our neighborhood worse. And I would ask you to give serious consideration to shrinking the size of the property. If you look at 8136 across the street, it's almost all impervious surface. And if they're going to do that again, now at 8136, the water runs off to Westmoreland. At ours, we're on a hill. It's going to run down to the streets. And then the sewer has to be able to accept it. And I don't think it can. It's my opinion. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Any other comments from the floor?

Mike Thompson, architect for the Thompson Design Group, architect for the project. I guess my only response would say, and it was pointed out that yes, we are reducing the runoff from the current houses there, not by a lot, but it is less than what was there. I would say alternatively, yes, we would be willing to put a drywall in similar to what we've done at 8136 and run all the downspouts from both the garage and the house to the dry well in order to take care of the water problems. This is certainly not the first project we've heard about water on and don't understand. Yes, we're reducing the runoff somewhat, but really, in the past, we've always had to put a dry well in, and we're certainly willing to do that again.

OK, thank you. Any other comments? Further comments from the commission on site plan?

Are we talking about a rain garden or a dry well?

So the dry well and the rain garden will be based on the soil infiltration grade. Without soil testing, I don't know if the dry well is working or not. So the rain garden may be the best option for this problem.

Okay, so then you're not committing to a rain garden.

So I will, so before I do any design, we have to do soil testing first. To determine the soil in certain way for the soil before I determine what kind, you know, the dry well or the rain garden can be working on this one. So I think maybe use a rain garden will be the option I can use over here. Because the dry well just hold water there, you know. If they had a very bad soil, It doesn't go anywhere. It's just sitting there. So that's why it depends on the soil infiltration way and soil testing we have to do before I can do anything. But we will provide some kind of PMP to immigrate the water from this one.

If I may, I wouldn't feel comfortable reviewing whatever they do since we don't know what it is against a staff. So I'd recommend that they study it because if they do want to go down a drywall route, then we'll add our typical conditions about having the soil testing and everything else prior to that. If they instead choose to go with a rain garden BMP, then we would still want them to show the calculations of what that rain garden is going to hold, how it's going to be planted, et cetera. So I would recommend to you all that you table this and allow them to – to come back with a design

thank you anna we we need a definite solution not just this or that and it must be backed up with uh factual information so um we'll take anna's recommendation

i move to table the plan review to a future date to be determined

All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Okay. We do have the next item is the architectural review board. And I'll ask the client, would you like to continue at this point? or come back and look at everything as a whole. I think that's up in the air, to be honest. I think everything should be handled as a whole so that when the site plan and the architectural review are looked at, they should relate to each other. Steve, I think

there should still be some value in going forward with the architectural just to hear comments to the changes on the plan, just so maybe we can get a more fully formed plan when they come back the next time.

Okay.

I'll go with that.

You're still here. Charlie, stick around.

Following revisions are noted since the previous submission. It has been revised to 26 feet 8 inches, and the context elevation has been revised to reflect the proper height of the house to the west. Two Sargent Cherry trees are proposed to soften the east facade. Staff recommend an alternative evergreen be selected to provide a year-round buffer. Staff recommend approval of the condition that the Sargent Cherry trees be replaced with evergreen trees.

Okay. Linda or Jim?

Mike Thompson, Thompson Design Group, architect for the project. Yes, we heard your comments last time. We, the original house, you know, we had the six foot side yard. We actually had a couple of trees put in there. We will revise those trees to be what should be there. But so basically we're using two of the five height mitigation projects procedures also as we talked about we put a hip roof on the front of the house so the existing gable there the corners don't stick out as much it lessens the look of the height of the house the house is like I said three and a half feet below the ordinance and so would feel and still very nice looking

Okay. Is that it? Yep. Okay. Jim, do you have comments?

Yes. I definitely think the new roof helps with the perceived height and helps bring that down. So thank you for that. At least with my personal comments, the two things that have not changed are the ribbon drive and the cantilevers. So I In going back and doing a deep dive on ribbon drives in Clayton Gardens, there are currently only two ribbon drives in Claydon Gardens. And one of them is your other property at... 81-36 on University. I went back and listened to that whole meeting. That ribbon drive was kind of a source of contention at that meeting, and ultimately you guys agreed to shrink it as part of that. There's one other ribbon drive, and then there was another ribbon drive at 81-40 Kingsbury that you proposed, and that one was shot down. So there are only two ribbon drives. And personally, that is not something that I want to see proliferate in the neighborhood because I think the main reason here for the ribbon drives is to pick up additional green space basically anywhere possible. And I think it's a much better solution to shrink the driveway, to shrink the overall footprint instead of trying to basically try and fit as much house as possible. And I Um, as far as, you know, once again, you know, on the rear of the house, you're asking for alternative compliance because you don't meet 75% brick on the back. The reason it doesn't meet 75% on the back is because we have these two large cantilevers, one cantilevering out six feet. Um, and I believe the purpose of those cantilevers is basically just to try and fit more square footage on this lot. So, uh, I understand it's very tough. This lot is 6,272 square feet, which is a standard lot size in Clayton Gardens. And that comes to 0.14 acres. And I will give you credit because you are very adept at siting houses on because this is the fourth one that you've done in the last five years for for mainland. Going through and reviewing all those and reviewing, these houses have gotten progressively larger each step along the way. And this would represent an 8% increase over the largest one that you had done previous to this. So I have concerns over those cantilevers and basically cantilevering out in almost every direction here in order to try and pick up extra square footage. And in this case, you know, we're looking at almost a 4,800 square foot house for a lot that's 62, a little over 6,200 square feet, like I said, 0.14 acres. And I think it's important to just kind of take all this into context and respect some of the comments that we got along the lines of Clayton 2040, respect maybe some of the comments we've gotten here in the room tonight of these houses that are basically maybe not literally going lot line to lot line, but pretty close to taking up a large amount of mass. And I think I personally would like to just see, I'm not saying a massive reduction, but even Those cantilevers represent 173 square feet. I think even the reduction of that would go a long way. It could bring the rear of that building into compliance, and I think especially at this point, for what this point was a speculative project, I think would go a long

I can say Westmoreland is for sure the largest house we've done by far. This house is actually 3,400 square feet in the top, not counting the basement. Yeah,

this house is being marketed as 4,727 square feet.

I'm assuming they're including the basement in

that. Well, they are including basement, but I'm saying that's how the house is being advertised.

But I guess, well, here's the things I know off the top of my head. This house is one foot narrower than 8136 University, the one that's kitty corner across the street. We did that in order to have a planting strip along the driveway. So we've tried to do some things to mitigate things we've heard at the meetings here. And so that's... some of that. This for sure is way smaller than Westmoreland. I'd have to go back and look actually at a couple houses on Kingsbury.

Yeah, I'm specifically referencing 8140 Kingsbury, 8120 Kingsbury, 8136 University, and then this being 8145 Kingsbury as the four in Clayton Gardens.

Oh, okay, right. Oh, I see, not counting Westmoreland.

Westmoreland, yes, is considerably bigger, which had its own challenges, obviously, but...

But I'll go back and look at the square footages. But like I said, I know for sure this house is one foot narrower than the one in Kitty Corner across the street. Now, I don't know how that square footage works out, but yeah.

Each, like I said, there's been one project where you've asked for a ribbon driveway and that was denied. There's been another where the ribbon driveway has been shortened. Would you be willing to... Dispose of the ribbon driveway and just go with a standard driveway? Judging that it's not something that you don't see proliferated in the neighborhood, and I'm personally worried about it setting a poor precedent as far as just a way to pick up, to make houses even larger. Especially when, let's see, I'm trying to think of the... I don't have the exact verbiage here, but basically saying architecturally it's something that's not an approved use in Clayton Gardens, but it's something that we've at least seen in a lot of your Because it's something that's being proposed each time, and it's not kind of like an approved form that's set forth. So we have to approve it on top of that. And I know when this came up the first time, you used 8136 as an example of saying, like, oh, they're in the neighborhood. But that's one that you guys did. So I hate to say, at this one, if those come out now, we have three. And then it's like, OK, well, these two we can use as an example for another one. And I feel like it's taking us in kind of the wrong direction of where people are asking us to go as far as a board and a commission.

Well, during the discussion at 8136 University, I know we had proposed one, and then the commission had decided, well, we don't want them in the front yard setback. So we reduced it to that. Also, of course, we don't have it near the turnaround by the garage. So that kind of sets some – that's really what limits, as you're saying. It was shrunk down to that. I guess our understanding was that would be okay with the commission from then on, but – No, it's not a huge part of the site. Whether we have it or not, it could be gotten rid of.

That's

all for me. Chris?

I have some concerns, the ribbon driveway being one of them, just because I don't necessarily see it as an informed by good design in this case. I see it as trying to pick up, as Jim was saying, more of this permeable land. And I do feel that we are setting a precedent. If we apply this one, then we suddenly have two projects that we can go back and say, the next person can say, well, there's a precedent for approving these ones. I am also concerned about the gradual erosion of the 75% of the rear facade with brick. I feel like that is also setting a precedent that we're just slowly taking away the guidelines that we have in terms of with these cantilevers. If we approve this, then we are slowly chipping away at kind of the guidelines that we've set up. going back to the trees, I think trees are my thing for this meeting. I don't know why, but I'm wondering to staff, you know, how will we really assess the effectiveness of these height mitigation strategies? I mean, evergreens or the columnar ones that were before are not fast growing trees necessarily. So how do we assess whether that is an effective mitigation strategy? Are we just kind of kicking the ball down the street?

So the Clayton Gardens Urban Design District outlines specific height mitigation strategies. It doesn't provide for some sort of assessment after it's installed. But yes, it is the reality that trees do take time to grow. Sometimes in the past, people have proposed perennials rather than evergreens. So in this circumstance, the best we can do is recommend an evergreen that will hopefully grow up to be taller and provide more of a buffer.

In terms of the evergreen as opposed to the sergeant cherries, do you feel like that is... I know that you proposed them because of the clay soil. Is that equally a good choice in terms of screening?

The sergeant cherry is going to change visually seasonally, whereas an evergreen is going to provide that year-round buffer. Okay. So the sergeant cherry kind of... There's two recommendations attached to that one. There's the separate clay portion and then there's the separate visual portion.

I guess the last thing, it goes along with that too. I'm also worried about kind of kicking the ball down the street in terms of are we just deferring the compatibility kind of impact in this case too? I agree with Jim that it feels like it's too much house for this lot. And it feels like we're trying everything possible to kind of cut out a little bit here, a little bit there. when the council is expressly saying it feels like it's too big of a home for the lot. That's the only comment that I have.

Darren? I don't have a lot to add. I mean, it's big. It's kind of the problem with valuable real estate is that you're forcing every inch that you can. Shows, but no additional comments to theirs.

Susan?

Yeah, in building on what's been said, all I'm going to add is that I do wonder when we've got the Clinton Gardens Urban Design Districts, as has been said, when we start making exceptions. And the other exception that wasn't raised was at the rear of the house not meeting the 75% brick because of, quote, unusual circumstances, I think is the standard that that has a superior result. And I don't know if that's been shown. I'm not a design expert or anything else, but I'm just looking at what the standard is and what has to be shown to actually move from that standard to an alternative compliance. And I'm not sure I'm quite convinced yet that that's there.

Well, I guess what I said last time is yes. The rear of the house has less than if you just take the rear of the house is 70 less than 75%. If you take the entire house I think it's, it's upwards of 85% the entire house, including the rear. So yeah, I guess what I was trying to say, it's not that we don't like BRIC or wanted to do something cheaper. No, we certainly have tried to, I guess, conform to the spirit of the ordinance of, yeah, we're for sure going to have more than 75 or BRIC anywhere we can. No

one?

I like the front elevation. You know, I think it's well done. I like what you've done to the roof. The left elevation, where I see the bathroom hanging out over, that becomes a bit bothersome. It just, it looks too large. too heavy. You know, I know you can do it structurally. But that combined with the part of the master bedroom hanging out cantilevered is too heavy. Now, most people will not see it inside elevation. But when you get to the back, The different material that you've used and then the projection as you're standing in the backyard. That it just seems top heavy.

If I might say, well, above the kitchen window is the master bedroom, which is just a square cantilever. The one in the very back there is the bath painting out. It matches the shape of the deck below. So it both provides covering for that door there. weather covering for the door and a small amount of covered patio space, I guess, but kind of meant to the two symbols match each other going up.

Yeah, but looking at the plans, part of the master bedroom is cantilevered. Correct, yes. Yeah. That elevation, it concerns me. And I know you could possibly do it in brick. I wouldn't suggest that. But doing it in a different material, it jumps out and just looks, I think, The front elevation, the left elevation, the right elevation is a bit busy with the projections, the bays. But I think the back needs reworking.

I agree with virtually everything the other Commission members, board members have said. But basically... I think the mass of the house is just too big. This is one of the smaller lots in the neighborhood. We do have the design district, and I think we need to follow more of the rules there. But having this house sitting up on... raised up above the street only makes it look even bigger so when i'm looking at the context and i did walk that street over the weekend even though it was cold um i think the house is stressing both the single plot that it's proposed on as well as the neighborhood and um All the concerns I generally agree with. I do feel that the roof, having the gable ends taken down and sloped in is a much better solution. But I also feel that the three peaked gables on the front only accentuate the height and the mass of the house. So I have many concerns with it. Any comments from the audience? Mr.

Albert? Now I understand, Steve. When you asked me my question is whether I was here, which I was here for, and hopefully I didn't, well, I think I spoke on both on the architectural and on the site plan before. I want to say, we have a lot and a half. So our lot is one of the largest on the street. My house is 3,200 square feet. It fills the lot. There's green space. And everything you all have said, I agree with. And I know you're working within the constraints of what the architectural plan plans general architectural guidelines are for Clayton gardens. This is way too big. And I would ask you, I'm glad you walk the street because you can see it. That lot is tiny, probably the smallest on the block. I don't care if it technically meets Clayton gardens guidelines. It is tiny. It's a tiny house and, and they're trying to build a massive structure on it. And you can look at what they've done to 8136. It's all impervious. And frankly, the roof is too high. I don't know why you all... I'm not criticizing. I don't implore you to not approve this plan that they've put in front of you. And I'm in favor of development. Don't get me wrong. I think I'm all in favor of tearing down the house that's there and building a new house. But the house should be commensurate with the houses on the street, and it should not be disproportionate to them, which is You know, they're trying to get the maximum dollar out of it, which isn't right. And if they don't want to do it, let another developer come in and do it. Thank you.

Any other comments? Any further comments from the board? We do have a staff recommendation to approve with one condition. And I think we've brought up many other potential conditions also.

I move to table the architectural review to a future date to be determined.

Second.

All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Okay. Thank you. Okay, we will move on to new business. The first item is 7811 Clayton Road. Is the applicant here or online? No? Okay. Well, we'll move on then and we'll come back. We'll move to items 4 and 5, which are 61 Topton Way. And I know the applicant is here. So we will begin with the site plan review.

The subject property is located on the southeast corner of the intersection of Topton and Maryland. Property measures 0.73 acres. The zone C2 is in the Maryland Gateway Overlay District. Property is presently developed with surface parking lot and the applicant is seeking to construct a mixed-use residential commercial structure. Proposal meets the zoning requirements of the C2 district, the Maryland Gateway overlay. I guess I should clarify since I'm seeing those zonings. So this application was submitted prior to the approval of the new zoning from the City Council. Stormwater will be adequately managed on site via underground detention. The landscape plan features plantings that are appropriate for the size of the site and character of the property. Bicycle parking has not been accounted for on the site, and staff are of the opinion that the project will meet the criteria for site plan approval with the conditions identified in the staff recommendations section. Staff recommend approval with the following conditions. One, the applicant shall record a deed restriction noting the location and maintenance requirements of the stormwater detention BMP and shall submit proof of filing prior to the issuance of a building permit. And two, the proposal shall be revised to include three bicycle parking spaces as part of the building permit submission.

Hey, good evening. Good evening. I am Scott Melman, and on behalf of Melman Family Development, my brother Blair and I want to thank the board members and the city staff for this opportunity to present publicly our next project, RK and Clayton. RK and Claydon represents our family's continued commitment to build wonderful projects that our community can be proud of and builds off the success of other projects such as the Pearl and Clayton condos that we completed a few years ago right down the street. The name of these projects are Kay and Clayton, and the Pearl and Clayton are by no accident as they end with the name Clayton. The Crescent in Clayton also shares a similar meaning. Born and raised still living in Clayton and working in Clayton, our family is very proud of this. This project specifically is a mixed-use development with 29 condos units and approximately 6,000 square feet of retail space designed to fit within the wonderful neighborhood. To help present this project further and answer any questions, our wonderful teammates from Bowles Engineering and CoreTend will take over from here. Thank you.

Tyler, we're doing site plan review right now.

Do you have that?

Yeah.

While he's getting that ready, I'll just go ahead and tell you who I am. I know I know several of you, but someone new that I haven't met before, and then Darren, who I haven't seen in 30 years. My name is Tyler Stevens, Core 10 Architecture. We're here on behalf of the Melman family. We have been working with the Melmans for the better part of my career. So a long time, we've done a lot of projects together, mostly all in Clayton, although recently some in Kirkwood too, but I know that we are all very excited about this project specifically because of the neighborhood that it sits in. There's a kind of a long tradition of building in this neighborhood, seeing a lot of change over the years. And so we've worked together as a team on several projects in the neighborhood and this project being a culmination of that.

Forgive me, folks. We don't often use this one.

So easy. Technology has made our lives more complicated than it used to be.

That's what I used to do is hand it to you.

Maybe I have to take back what you say about Clayton, you know, to everyone else. It's so wonderful presenting here because you can just stick things in the wall and they magically appear on the screen. I don't know.

That's good.

Third one down. Yep. Great, thank you. One

second, let me share it on Zoom real quick.

right so first of all just a quick orientation of where we are in case you don't know but the topton brighton neighborhood sitting in here this project however is a little bit unique even though we're kind of on the edge of the topton bright neighborhood we are actually in the maryland gateway district um so when i talk about that specifically with this map here um just well Next door to, you can see the proposed project there in the red, just to the west is the Calaris campus. And this property is actually part of that campus. And I'm sure you're all aware that that campus is going through some transition now. And so this has been sort of parceled off and sold off across Topton Way. We very much at Core 10 believe in contextual design of what's around. And so I did want to let you know at the beginning, we did meet with the... Shoot, what's... the opera theater, yes, who's currently planning to build something there. We met with them at the very beginning of this and wanted to get their plans to kind of see if we could integrate something together. However, I think we're a little bit ahead of them. They're just not advanced in their plans enough to have anything to show. So we have to go a little bit off of what might be there, but I do know a little bit of what they're headed for. You can see right here the Maryland Gateway District, which is highlighted. And it very much starts up there at Brentwood and Maryland. That stretch, which is your famed retail stretch right there, has a certain character to it. And the character is quite different, north side and south side. But everything is close to the street and creates this nice little walking environment. And it's definitely part of what I would consider downtown Clayton. The Maryland Gateway District was set up and designed to pull those parameters, all of the various regulations, definitely lead you from there to the west, out to the edge of Clayton. And it's my understanding that's sort of the purpose of this district is to create this entrance into downtown Clayton. I would say... having been here working in Clayton for a while, there are two sort of main entrances into Clayton. You're either coming up Hanley or you're coming down Maryland, whether you're coming from the west or the east. Certainly people come from the north down Hanley as well, but I'd say the primary from the highways are that way. And So it's very important to have this entrance into downtown Clayton kind of set the precedent of what's happening. And so that's why we really think this is a great opportunity of a project here because it has the potential to create that signature on the west end when you're coming in. You'll have this new performing arts theater right there, and then this building will start what I would consider the beginning of downtown going further. Certainly, Straub's is in between, and Straub's has been there for a long time. I don't anticipate Straub's going anywhere anytime soon. So that's another part of the context, of course, is they have a parking lot across Brighton Way. But even if some development were to go there in the future, you would see that that parking lot would be filled in a kind of similar manner. And so we're trying to be cognizant of both today's condition and the future. Because as we all know, these buildings last for a long time. So to that, we have set the building up on the corner Before I go there, let me just point out the corner. We're going to talk about the corner a lot. But in terms of the site plan, there are a couple things to note. First of all, the property has a curved corner on it. It is not a triangular property. So that starts to inform a little bit of the curve. But also, I always consider this end of Clayton to be what I call the curvy district. If you look around at all these buildings that are there, this started a long time ago. Certainly, Claris has a curved circular corner. Across the street, there have been renovations and additions to these buildings over the years, and they've created these curved... This one directly across is really nice. I like it. It has this wonderful... big canopy that comes across the first floor and curves on the corner. Directly across the street, there's a circular entrance. Certainly Straub's is built on the curve, and maybe that's what started all of this. I don't know. Or maybe it's just the layout of these streets because the streets are all curved. The whole neighborhood, every building in here that we have worked on at least, I'm trying to address the fact that these streets are not rectilinear. So that's where a lot of this will come from. You all know what it looks like, but of course this is the main entrance in. And across the street, Calaris, you can see how that sits. Again, we don't know what's going to be there in the future, but I did get one little inkling of a snap that somebody showed me at one point in time, which was also a curved theater end there on the corner. I hope that that comes true, but we don't know. Another, this is just to the south of the property going down Topton. So this is the building next door. And then the building to the right you can see is the Pearl, which Scott mentioned earlier. Certainly we're gonna be dealing with the flow of this building out of the neighborhood. That is one of our primary objectives is to pull the design language of the neighborhood out. And we'll talk about that when we get to the ARB portion. But I do want to let you know that this house next door is one of the last that remains of the original fabric of the neighborhood. They've all been sort of developed over the years. And it is currently kind of part of this project. We're not going to talk about it tonight, but this will be phase two of this project. It is under control by the Melmans. And it's very much planned to once the building we're talking about tonight, once RK is done, to go back in and then use this lot to create a new development that kind of is the final piece to glue them all together. So we're not going to be left with one lone ranger that's there just to let you know. There's not a whole lot to see on the Maryland side, except the one thing I will point out on this is look at that picture and how sloped the sidewalk looks. The camera's not crooked here. There's a major hill going up here, so there's a lot of topography change that we'll be dealing with. In the site plan, this is how the property lays out on the corner. Here's where you can see what I was mentioning before about the property line itself is curved. So it'd be hard to build a sharp angle corner building here. Well, you'd build it off of the corner actually. But because the streets are not perpendicular, A sharp angle, while there are some buildings that are beautiful like that, certainly the Flatiron Building in New Jeffery Yorg is the famous one, but that's a much more dramatic corner. And I think here doing a sharp angle was too harsh, too much in your face. And so we're softening that whole corner with a series of curves that lend sort of the signature to the building. The remainder of the site is set up in an L-shaped block. We have kind of two parts to the building. There's this part that goes along Maryland that has sort of one character addressing the views and the traffic and the nature of Maryland and just what it is as a street. And then we have another bar that runs along Topton that's certainly starting to address much more the residential character of the rest of the neighborhood, and that's where we can start to blend all this together. In the back, the parking garage fills the site. So above the parking garage, we're proposing a roof deck that will create a residential garden just on that, just the floor above the parking garage which certainly pulls the building off of the property line some. Again, I said future development of something in the Straub's lot that if something does go there, Hopefully I will follow the same pattern when they hire me to do that one, if I'm not dead and gone by the time that happens. But you get more space in there and creating an interior to the block that is more pleasant than buildings right up against each other. So that is the bulk of the site plan orientation. Just to give you some pointers of where things are happening there. The Maryland side has the retail. So in this bar, as I said, the character of this is retail oriented up on the sidewalk, imposing the Clayton downtown sidewalk standards with the tree plantings and everything. We have two entrances to two retail spaces here. One faces this corner and one faces the other corner, east and west. And so the one on the west corner is definitely set up to be more of a restaurant type of retail with a little plaza out front, certainly corresponding to the Performing Arts Center that would be across the street so that people can eat dinner, sit on the plaza, walk over to the show, etc. They kind of go together. Then on the east side, this corner comes in and faces downtown. And so it's something that more orients itself towards the view of downtown and to the east. Both of these entrances, as you can see, are pulled around the corner from the face. And that is to kind of create a little kind of plaza entrances to get into the building rather than just a door right on the sidewalk. The south end of the building goes all downhill. This is the high end right here at the corner. Everything goes downhill, down, down, down to this corner. The difference, if I remember right, is about 24 feet in elevation, something like that. So it's quite a drop. So we come in on the low side down here with the driveway. That will lead you to the underground garage because it's already down low. All of trash and electric and all that stuff happens in the back corner, which is the pattern of all of these types of condo buildings. So I'll rest there. Oh, one other thing, sorry. The parking for the retail and the residential, because we're providing for both, there are two parking garages. They're on top of each other. The residential one is at the very bottom that will be accessed off of this lower ramp, and it's completely underground. The retail garage is above that. behind the retail at that level. It is accessed off of Topton and comes in, and it's just in this back half. We met with staff early on to talk about circulation, cars, public works, all of this, because I had a question at the very beginning for the staff and just the city in whole. When you've got retail on Maryland, would you prefer an entrance to the garage off of Maryland or off of Topton, and I could see it argued both ways. And it was pretty much, well, it was certainly indicated from staff and we agreed as well that coming off Topton It was a better approach. You slow down when you go around the corner, and there is an entrance to the other site, which will be the Performing Arts Center. They're going to have a main entrance right across the street going into the site there as well. So that is why the entrance to the retail is there, but we held it as far up to the corner as we could away from the rest of the residential. With that, I will take questions. Okay. Well, Tyler,

right so first of all just a quick orientation of where we are in case you don't know but the topton brighton neighborhood sitting in here this project however is a little bit unique even though we're kind of on the edge of the topton bright neighborhood we are actually in the maryland gateway district um so when i talk about that specifically with this map here um just well Next door to, you can see the proposed project there in the red, just to the west is the Calaris campus. And this property is actually part of that campus. And I'm sure you're all aware that that campus is going through some transition now. And so this has been sort of parceled off and sold off across Topton Way. We very much at Core 10 believe in contextual design of what's around. And so I did want to let you know at the beginning, we did meet with the... Shoot, what's... the opera theater, yes, who's currently planning to build something there. We met with them at the very beginning of this and wanted to get their plans to kind of see if we could integrate something together. However, I think we're a little bit ahead of them. They're just not advanced in their plans enough to have anything to show. So we have to go a little bit off of what might be there, but I do know a little bit of what they're headed for. You can see right here the Maryland Gateway District, which is highlighted. And it very much starts up there at Brentwood and Maryland. That stretch, which is your famed retail stretch right there, has a certain character to it. And the character is quite different, north side and south side. But everything is close to the street and creates this nice little walking environment. And it's definitely part of what I would consider downtown Clayton. The Maryland Gateway District was set up and designed to pull those parameters, all of the various regulations, definitely lead you from there to the west, out to the edge of Clayton. And it's my understanding that's sort of the purpose of this district is to create this entrance into downtown Clayton. I would say... having been here working in Clayton for a while, there are two sort of main entrances into Clayton. You're either coming up Hanley or you're coming down Maryland, whether you're coming from the west or the east. Certainly people come from the north down Hanley as well, but I'd say the primary from the highways are that way. And So it's very important to have this entrance into downtown Clayton kind of set the precedent of what's happening. And so that's why we really think this is a great opportunity of a project here because it has the potential to create that signature on the west end when you're coming in. You'll have this new performing arts theater right there, and then this building will start what I would consider the beginning of downtown going further. Certainly, Straub's is in between, and Straub's has been there for a long time. I don't anticipate Straub's going anywhere anytime soon. So that's another part of the context, of course, is they have a parking lot across Brighton Way. But even if some development were to go there in the future, you would see that that parking lot would be filled in a kind of similar manner. And so we're trying to be cognizant of both today's condition and the future. Because as we all know, these buildings last for a long time. So to that, we have set the building up on the corner Before I go there, let me just point out the corner. We're going to talk about the corner a lot. But in terms of the site plan, there are a couple things to note. First of all, the property has a curved corner on it. It is not a triangular property. So that starts to inform a little bit of the curve. But also, I always consider this end of Clayton to be what I call the curvy district. If you look around at all these buildings that are there, this started a long time ago. Certainly, Claris has a curved circular corner. Across the street, there have been renovations and additions to these buildings over the years, and they've created these curved... This one directly across is really nice. I like it. It has this wonderful... big canopy that comes across the first floor and curves on the corner. Directly across the street, there's a circular entrance. Certainly Straub's is built on the curve, and maybe that's what started all of this. I don't know. Or maybe it's just the layout of these streets because the streets are all curved. The whole neighborhood, every building in here that we have worked on at least, I'm trying to address the fact that these streets are not rectilinear. So that's where a lot of this will come from. You all know what it looks like, but of course this is the main entrance in. And across the street, Calaris, you can see how that sits. Again, we don't know what's going to be there in the future, but I did get one little inkling of a snap that somebody showed me at one point in time, which was also a curved theater end there on the corner. I hope that that comes true, but we don't know. Another, this is just to the south of the property going down Topton. So this is the building next door. And then the building to the right you can see is the Pearl, which Scott mentioned earlier. Certainly we're gonna be dealing with the flow of this building out of the neighborhood. That is one of our primary objectives is to pull the design language of the neighborhood out. And we'll talk about that when we get to the ARB portion. But I do want to let you know that this house next door is one of the last that remains of the original fabric of the neighborhood. They've all been sort of developed over the years. And it is currently kind of part of this project. We're not going to talk about it tonight, but this will be phase two of this project. It is under control by the Melmans. And it's very much planned to once the building we're talking about tonight, once RK is done, to go back in and then use this lot to create a new development that kind of is the final piece to glue them all together. So we're not going to be left with one lone ranger that's there just to let you know. There's not a whole lot to see on the Maryland side, except the one thing I will point out on this is look at that picture and how sloped the sidewalk looks. The camera's not crooked here. There's a major hill going up here, so there's a lot of topography change that we'll be dealing with. In the site plan, this is how the property lays out on the corner. Here's where you can see what I was mentioning before about the property line itself is curved. So it'd be hard to build a sharp angle corner building here. Well, you'd build it off of the corner actually. But because the streets are not perpendicular, A sharp angle, while there are some buildings that are beautiful like that, certainly the Flatiron Building in New York is the famous one, but that's a much more dramatic corner. And I think here doing a sharp angle was too harsh, too much in your face. And so we're softening that whole corner with a series of curves that lend sort of the signature to the building. The remainder of the site is set up in an L-shaped block. We have kind of two parts to the building. There's this part that goes along Maryland that has sort of one character addressing the views and the traffic and the nature of Maryland and just what it is as a street. And then we have another bar that runs along Topton that's certainly starting to address much more the residential character of the rest of the neighborhood, and that's where we can start to blend all this together. In the back, the parking garage fills the site. So above the parking garage, we're proposing a roof deck that will create a residential garden just on that, just the floor above the parking garage which certainly pulls the building off of the property line some. Again, I said future development of something in the Straub's lot that if something does go there, Hopefully I will follow the same pattern when they hire me to do that one, if I'm not dead and gone by the time that happens. But you get more space in there and creating an interior to the block that is more pleasant than buildings right up against each other. So that is the bulk of the site plan orientation. Just to give you some pointers of where things are happening there. The Maryland side has the retail. So in this bar, as I said, the character of this is retail oriented up on the sidewalk, imposing the Clayton downtown sidewalk standards with the tree plantings and everything. We have two entrances to two retail spaces here. One faces this corner and one faces the other corner, east and west. And so the one on the west corner is definitely set up to be more of a restaurant type of retail with a little plaza out front, certainly corresponding to the Performing Arts Center that would be across the street so that people can eat dinner, sit on the plaza, walk over to the show, etc. They kind of go together. Then on the east side, this corner comes in and faces downtown. And so it's something that more orients itself towards the view of downtown and to the east. Both of these entrances, as you can see, are pulled around the corner from the face. And that is to kind of create a little kind of plaza entrances to get into the building rather than just a door right on the sidewalk. The south end of the building goes all downhill. This is the high end right here at the corner. Everything goes downhill, down, down, down to this corner. The difference, if I remember right, is about 24 feet in elevation, something like that. So it's quite a drop. So we come in on the low side down here with the driveway. That will lead you to the underground garage because it's already down low. All of trash and electric and all that stuff happens in the back corner, which is the pattern of all of these types of condo buildings. So I'll rest there. Oh, one other thing, sorry. The parking for the retail and the residential, because we're providing for both, there are two parking garages. They're on top of each other. The residential one is at the very bottom that will be accessed off of this lower ramp, and it's completely underground. The retail garage is above that. behind the retail at that level. It is accessed off of Topton and comes in, and it's just in this back half. We met with staff early on to talk about circulation, cars, public works, all of this, because I had a question at the very beginning for the staff and just the city in whole. When you've got retail on Maryland, would you prefer an entrance to the garage off of Maryland or off of Topton, and I could see it argued both ways. And it was pretty much, well, it was certainly indicated from staff and we agreed as well that coming off Topton It was a better approach. You slow down when you go around the corner, and there is an entrance to the other site, which will be the Performing Arts Center. They're going to have a main entrance right across the street going into the site there as well. So that is why the entrance to the retail is there, but we held it as far up to the corner as we could away from the rest of the residential. With that, I will take questions. Okay. Well, Tyler,

I appreciate you following all the regulations, and it's good to see that. We're in the Maryland Gateway downtown overlay district. You're adjacent to the Topton-Brighton urban design, and this is a C2 general commercial district. And you started out talking about context. And as we know, we've talked about that quite a bit. I'd like to look at the context that this site plan is working with. If you could go back to the view east from Calaris. View east from Calaris?

One more, I think. One more. That one.

Yes. Okay. And I went over there and I stood not in the middle of the street, but on the west side. And I was trying to picture this building. And what I see is where the sidewalk stops is the property line. So the building would come out and take all of this greenery, correct? Correct. So then I got in the car and I drove back to the Clayton-Ladeau border and I turned around and I drove slowly Sunday morning and pictured it. And what it does, it blocks out the view of downtown Clayton as you're coming in. Every other property along Maryland Avenue is set back. Calaris is set back quite far. I would really not recommend that. But if you look at the Straub's property, even though there's parking, it is set back. If you go across the street and you have a site plan that we could go back to, all the properties across the street are also set back from the building lines. And every property has green space between the sidewalk and the building proper. So that's on Maryland Avenue. Now, when you're turning and you're going down Topton Way. You can walk from Maryland Avenue all the way around to Shaw Park Drive. Every single building is set back and has greenery, including the Pearl. Those two buildings, I think, are magnificent. They're the most beautiful on that entire curving block. And Here again, there's no setback. So this building is right on the property line, both on Maryland Avenue and on Topton Way, except for the small plaza entry. I find that a problem, that in reality, I don't think it's following the context of the neighborhood. so um and of course you have a right to build out to the property line which you've done so we uh differ in that uh also i um i think you're over 90 coverage on the lot is that correct probably okay yeah um just wanted to uh bring that up um so i do have these concerns We'll get into the architectural later, but as far as siting the building, I think it will be an impediment to the view of downtown Clayton and the flow of traffic and the openness of Maryland Avenue from buildings that are set back to tightening it down at Topton Avenue. And, um, it doesn't please me, but, um, So what I'm saying is, basically, what is allowed and what is appropriate can quite often be different. And I think that's where I'm going. Let's move on. Helen?

Okay, I would agree with Steve. Your rendering shows on Topton you have street trees and is the sidewalk wide enough

on topton yes

okay so looking at it the view that we have there um it is some of that planting along topton is the edge of the planting the West edge of the planting, the property line. I

can see that I didn't go far enough in my presentation. Let me pull up the site plan so we can get to some actual drawing lines. Well, landscape, that could tell you some. But I want you to see maybe back here is That's just so small. Well, but this is a good one to address. I think both of you are getting at. I mentioned that we're in the Maryland Overlay Gateway District because that district has specific zoning regulations that not... that not only allow but encourage you to get up to the street. That's sort of kind of the point of the district is I realize that these other buildings are off the street, but they were built before this district existed. And as far as Calaris goes, again, we don't know what's going to go there. I don't know where they are going to propose to put their building. But the Barton, which is on the west side of that building, is up to the street it's doing the exact same thing that we are and so um the plan that i saw from them that had that curve on it um had a curve and then like a park that went all along maryland um that was up on the street so their building was set way back into the back of the property again i don't know if they're going to do that in the end but that was the initial sketch What seemed appropriate to me in following the district and getting up to the sidewalk, the Barton does that on the west. We are on the east. We do the same thing. Our two buildings then bookend this public building in between because they're different. These are two private developments on either end. You have your public building. building which is a performing arts center center is a great kind of example of that type of building that pulls back off the street and has greenery in front and creates that kind of public park space so it seemed very appropriate to get up on the street to bookend that's why i think that that's the right thing to do there as far as going down topton which i think is what you're asking about the sidewalk It used to be, if you look in this particular drawing, you can see, even though it's, I apologize, it's small. The building that's next door to us, the one that's original, has the sidewalk right on the curb. That was the pattern of the neighborhood long ago. As the buildings have been developed, and this has been encouraged by the city staff and everything, and I think this is the absolute right thing to do, the sidewalk was pulled off of the curb and a tree lawn was put in. When we did the Pearl, we did the same thing. We pulled that sidewalk back. And whenever you have a tree lawn in front of the sidewalk, it's kind of a cue that that's residential. You don't usually see the tree lawn like that in a commercial district because you're parking along the street. People get out of their car and they kill all the grass. So in a commercial district like downtown, instead of having a tree lawn, your pattern is to have these tree wells. in the sidewalk, it's an extra wide sidewalk with the tree wells. So what we did is we took that pattern and ran it along Maryland and curved around the corner all the way to the entrance to the retail garage right there. That's the commercial Clayton standard sidewalk. right when we get to the entrance to the retail parking, the driveway that will cut across that sidewalk, that's where we're going to make the switch. to go to the tree lawn, pulling the sidewalk back off of the property, creating the tree lawn with the trees planted and starting that pattern that will then go into the neighborhood. Now this building again will be non-conforming until we redevelop it and we'll do the same. And that will pull it all together. That's really the intent of the trees, the sidewalk, the curb, the placement of all of that. is to transition. There's a whole lot about this project that's transitioning. We're in different zones, transitioning the site, transitioning the architecture, all of that. So that's why it's cited the way it is and why I thought it was appropriate.

Okay. What about ADA accessibility to the retail?

Yes, certainly. Some of this gets into architectural review, so I guess I don't, but I suppose that would fall under that. Here's the site plan of the retail level. Here are the two spaces that we're talking about and the entrances off one and the other. Anytime you have a real slopey broad site, ADA can be a challenge, but still something that should be met. On this corner, The plaza is, even though it's raised up off of the sidewalk, because the sidewalk falls so much. So we're creating this plaza as kind of a raised platform. It has a connection to the sidewalk right here in this corner. And that's your accessible entrance point in. Once you get past that, it's stairs that come down. But you can get in right there. The other side, because again of the hill going up so much, this one actually sits below grade a little bit. So there are different ways to handle this. You can have an entrance into the space and then create stairs on the inside. That's done in several retail spaces around downtown Clayton. We had to do that at the old Tawny Sushi, for instance. But in this instance, we thought it would be better and more welcoming to create that plaza that faces to the east, to downtown, It does have stairs, but the main accessible entrance is from the garage because that's where all the accessible parking is. So everyone who's coming to retail either one of these spaces really is parking in the garage and you have an accessible ramp that leads you to this back, which acts more as the main entrance. Again, this is the same pattern that was done in the Crescent. There's an entrance inside the garage to some of the retail that is more of, I guess, it doesn't feel as much like a main entrance there because there's so much street entrance, but it's the same pattern. So that's how we're handling accessibility.

Okay. Last question, bicycle parking?

Yes, we did not put that in here. I'm sorry, we forgot that, but we can certainly add it.

Okay. Nothing further.

And I, if you want to know where. Do you care? I think that, I mean, I've just thought about it tonight when I wrapped since getting the staff comments, but I would propose that this corner right here is the most logical place. We have leftover space in the edge of the parking anyway. That could be bicycle parking. And again, it's covered inside the garage and it's right there by this entrance to the retail.

Excuse me. Yeah, and I'll just pick up on that. Hopefully, with 29 living units in the commercial, you might consider more than three bicycle parking spots. The other question I had for you, having just come from a meeting involving Maplewood, which requires this, are you considering having it EV ready as you build it? Or what are you thinking in that

Having a

what? Electric vehicle. Oh, EV.

I thought you said ED.

No, sorry, no. Are you going to have it be able to accommodate charging for electric vehicles?

Yes. That's been coming up more and more in our projects, obviously. The way it's been handled, and it's In smaller buildings like the Pearl, it's actually pretty simple because you just build up your infrastructure of the electrical system to handle the extra load. And you put in the, it's almost like roughing in plumbing for a future bathroom. So you put in all the electric in the garage, And you allow the homeowners to then purchase, do they want to buy the actual plug or not? Because not everybody wants it and they can be expensive. And Ameren isn't giving them away anymore. So you kind of set it up to do that. When we started doing these larger projects that have more than, let's say, 20 units, at first the thinking was we do it the same way. But then we started meeting with the electric companies. And what a lot of people don't realize about EV charging is once you get a lot of cars, the transformer that is required to run that gets really big. So for instance... the project we're working on in Kirkwood right now with, with moments there are 40 units in that building. So it's even bigger than this one. And in order to have a transformer that would supply electric charging to all the units, 40 charging stations in the garage, the transformer is about the size of a school bus. So one, where are you going to put that on site? And two, it's quite unsightly. So that's, it's a challenge. Now, we have the transformer area, which is at the bottom of the driveway right here. And we have room for a pretty good-sized transformer there. We need a certain size for the building. But then the EV charging, you're going to need even more for that. And it's a disproportionate amount of load that people just aren't realizing because this is something new. So we'll put in as big a transformer as we can fit that will handle as many stations as possible. But I can pretty much tell you it's not going to provide 40. Well, this is only 29 units, but I don't know that we'll have the room to have everybody have that option.

But it is something for some amount, whatever's feasible, you are planning on putting it there, which I think would help the marketability of the bill.

It does, yes. A lot of people are demanding them.

Yeah, right. Okay. All right. Thanks.

First, did we read the staff report for that plan review? Okay, it was abbreviated. Okay. Maybe I just went right past that. So we can always go back to the point in there. No, no, no, not a specific thing. I don't have much to say as I play. And I just always typically think of these things as far as like, what's the existing condition and what's going in its place? I think anytime. especially in Clayton when we're looking for density to see, you know, a building like this go up where basically just a parking lot sits now. Overall, I think that can be considered a win, but I'll save most of my comments to architectural also. Chris?

Yeah, most of my comments were either addressed or deal with architectural. The bicycle parking, it's interesting because when I saw three spaces, I had assumed at first that it was just three bicycle spaces. And then I thought, no, there's no possible way. It just would be three spaces that they're referring to three distinct spaces around the building where bicycles would be located. But if I understand correctly, it is just referring to three spaces for bicycles, which is interesting to me. I learned something there. I had not considered the EV design, and I appreciate you putting this in context. I think you've taken some really good thoughts towards designing the building. I would be curious to know how... many EVs, and this is not a question to be answered now, but how many EVs it actually would be able to support based on the transformer that you're able to put there. Because I wouldn't want a building of this size to go up that suddenly is redundant because it only can accommodate, say, three electric vehicles, and we anticipate that 20 people would have those. So I think the only other thing that I have, I don't know how it compares, the imperviousness of the current parking lot As opposed to this site being covered, you know, 90% impervious with this new development. I don't know what the trade-off is there. But I would hope that the stormwater drainage and all that is modeled past a 15-year event. But the other comments I have are for architectural, so...

If I can just respond real quickly to two things, the EV charging and what was the one you said before that? Sorry. Bicycles. Yes. The bicycle one I'll take first because a lot of people don't necessarily think about this with condo buildings. When I say that's a good spot for the bicycle rack, that's just for the retail area. These condos come with large storage units in the garage. So pretty much everybody who has a bicycle who lives here, they're not going to put it in the rack. They don't want it in the rack with the rest of the public. So they have plenty of room to store their own bicycles. So in essence, we have 29 bicycle parking spaces in the storage units. That's one thing. With the EV in the future, will buildings that don't have chargers become obsolete? Maybe. We don't know. But I can tell you one thing because there's a big discussion in the industry right now. Something is going to have to change. If we're really going to a society that has 100% EV charging cars, the electric grid is going to have change. There's no way we can support that right now. And all of these buildings will be obsolete to some degree because I fully envisioned the transformer having to be ripped out and replaced with some super high-tech transformer in the future.

Darren? Yeah, the EV thing. My wife and I have both been driving EVs for like 10 years, and it has turned us off from buying places because they don't have them, and it's kind of binary. So we're probably in the minority, but having the ability to give as many people as possible will matter on the sales side. My other question is on the retail space. Retail space number two, if I'm seeing it correctly... If I'm on the sidewalk and I'm looking in that space, it will be below grade. That's correct. How far below grade will it be?

but it changes as it goes up the hill because it's so steep. But right here at the lowest point, you are about, I'm estimating here, but you're about two feet below the sidewalk there. And by the time it gets up to the corner, you're about four feet below the sidewalk. So, and you'll see this in the renderings. I've got some renderings to show you later, but it's going to feel like it actually makes for a nice retail space because you get a wall below your windows. If let's say it's office, you put desks up there. You could put display counters. You could do whatever below the glass because you've got that forefoot.

And then so from Maryland to get into that retail space, you will have to go down a set of stairs. If you're coming from the sidewalk. If you're On the bike thing, I was actually thinking more, you know, the high school's a block away and kids do go to Straub's. They go to everywhere around there. Some of them walk, some of them take their bikes. If this is a restaurant, you might have to deal with bikes in front. Maybe not in the way that you want to deal with them, but just something to think about. And then my other comment, I like the density of it. I actually like that it fills up the corner um i didn't think about the fact that you don't see the skyline of clayton coming up maryland but i do know i have noticed the skyline like from the highway and the parkway and stuff so it is something i hadn't thought of but um yeah as a resident of clayton and a desire to get rid of surface parking spots it seems i like it

Mark, come on up to the microphone.

Father, I'm Mark Millman of the family. So thank you for listening to us this evening. But what we do and we do it a lot and we're very proud of what we do is we look at the space, the site, a long time before we start designing something. And yes, I stood in the middle of the street and yes, I stood to the north and I stood to the south. And Tyler, if you would go back to that view. Looking west, looking east rather. Yeah, there you are. Okay. So if you're in the middle of the street, Steve and everybody, your view will not really be disturbed seeing downtown Clayton. You're going to see Maryland Walk. You're going see everything. You're going all those shops along Brentwood. You're going as clear as you see them right now. Our building is going to come over to the sidewalk But when you're on that street and you're in the middle of the street or you're in the lane that you're driving east, you're going to see everything. You're going to see the curve of strobs. Your view will not be disturbed like you were describing. I'm not being argumentative, but I stood in the middle of this street. I stood to the right and I stood to the left. And this was really, really, really important to us as to that view because we don't want that view disturbed as you were describing. We want to see it's the entrance. We're viewing this. as the entrance into Clayton coming from the west, looking to the east. And the way we curve our building, it allows us to see directly and to go riding up Maryland Avenue. So that's my comment.

Tyler, since we're on site plan, I think it would be good to have Mr. Vietmeyer come up and talk about all the water issues

Good evening, Eric Vietmar with Volz Engineering. We are the engineers of record for this project. As was stated, we're going over 90% of previous coverage on the site, but the increase is only 0.2 cubic feet per second for the design storm. That is a 15-year, 20-minute rain event because of how the geometry of everything, you know, a lower level ramp getting into the residential garages, designing everything for a 100-year rain event. I find it's a lot easier to design for that when you're talking to residents and property owners. It's only 35% more water, so why not? Given the constraints that we have for that lower level garage, we're working with MSD. They're even wanting us to try to – they're wanting us to provide 100-year, 24-hour storage. Detention for whatever we end up getting to that lower level, whether we do, whether we're going to be if we revise what we currently have or if we come up with something completely different. We're still working with MSD on that. But obviously the city will not approve plans until MSD has approved it. But everything will be. more than likely to that 100-year, 20-minute rain event and satisfy all of the MSD requirements for whatever type of volume storage we need to provide. If there's any questions beyond that, I'm more than happy to answer.

Well, just in very simple form, where does all the water on the

roof go? Right now, all the roof drains and terrace drains are going to be going down through the building to a detention chamber under the residential garage floor. And there'll be a metered release, a restricted outflow so that what's coming through is detained and there is no increase in the runoff leaving the site. But only, I ran through these numbers this morning, over 98% of the site runoff is all piped directly into MSD sewers. So you have less than 2% of the site's runoff on the surface crossing the property line onto the sidewalks and onto the streets.

Okay. Well, we really don't have much surface at all. Right. So it had to go somewhere. It has to go somewhere, yes.

So... Just to add to that, though, when we talk about impervious percentage, we're talking about the footprint, obviously, because that's where the building sits. This is a good example drawing, though, because that garden up there, that whole roof is a great place to catch a lot of water and hold it. You've got dirt up there on the roof that holds a lot of water before it goes into the drains. So even though the impervious is calculated on the ground, When you get up in the air, the site isn't as full as it might seem is my point.

Right. So that gives us a little benefit of a little bit of leeway. I'm bound by code. Code says green roofs still count as impervious coverage. So that's why my numbers are the way they are. The green roof that Tyler and his staff are designing will do some mitigation to that. I'm just not allowed to consider that. So it's a bonus for the city as far as that runoff number is concerned.

Well, thank you for staying within the rules. But thank you, Tyler, for pointing that out because that is about 18 or 20 percent of the building footprint. Other questions about water?

Currently, the surface lot

just drains into the surface. All drains right out onto Topton, correct? That's what I thought. So everything is on the surface. Once everything is done, just about all of it's going to be underground in pipes.

Okay. Anyone in the audience with any further comments or questions, or has everyone left? Okay. Other comments from the commission?

Is this in general about the architectural review or just the water?

We're on site plane review. Okay. Yeah. We'll get to architectural. We'll get there. Mark, I... Appreciate your comments. But while I was listening to you, I was thinking about the city of St. Louis. And if you've been down there recently and you've been on the Gateway Mall, there's a building that is stuck right in the middle of on one side of the mall. And when you're on the mall, it really it cuts off the north leg of the arch. And it's really very disturbing. I'm not going to talk about the design of the building, but I'm talking about the placement of the building. And I see on a much smaller scale something potentially occurring here because then we narrow down our vista. And I will go out and I'll walk down the middle of Maryland Avenue and I'll look. But I'm very concerned about both the Maryland Avenue and the Topton Way lack of setback. That's just my comment.

I know exactly which building you're talking about, and of course every architect in town hates that building because of exactly why you said that. The building is okay, but the site is terrible. With all due respect, that's a... Well, with respect, Steve, I would argue that that is a totally different situation because you have a public mall, which is an open space that someone put a building in, which should not have been. That public space would not be as powerful if it didn't have all the buildings ringing it and creating the boundary edge, right? So what I'm proposing here is exactly what I said before. This performing arts center will be that public space. We are creating the edge and ringing it, and we're really just providing a street view. I pulled up this rendering. This is going to be part of the architectural portion, but this is from out in the street. you still see the buildings down the street because that's, that's the way streets work. You know, the street is at the public space. So it's not like we're building the building in the middle of the street that would be akin to what you're talking about.

And I certainly agree with that. I was only talking about vistas as opposed to the buildings downtown. Uh, but here, um, I know the curvature of the building was mentioned, but to me, the building does not curve along Maryland Avenue. It's a pretty flat facade, and it does cut off strobs until you get almost beyond the building. So I guess I was looking for a little sensitivity in there that maybe a little... a little less shoulders coming out to the property line would fit better because the Maryland Gateway District, even though it's considered part of downtown, is not the equivalent of the other downtown districts where we do have virtually all the buildings coming out to the, property line. But they're also much, much higher. So I think this is a very distinct district or a character area itself. And I have concerns that this will This will promote more buildings coming out to the property line, which will be a massive change from what we've had in the past. But I understand it's allowed in the Maryland Gateway District. So I think I'm wrestling with those items. You know, do we maintain the context that we're living in right now? Or do we drastically change the context going forward? Anything else?

Do you have a rendering looking at, like from Maryland, looking at the northeast corner?

The other side. Yes. We're bleeding into architectural here, but I think we have to. Is that okay? Yeah. I said that the building had kind of two bars, one going along Maryland, one going along Topton, different characteristics. The bar that is along Maryland where the retail is, The entrances are, as I said, purposefully pulled around the sides so that the view coming up or down the street, either direction, It's to the entrance of that retail and kind of leading you in the building as opposed to not many people will, even though it's on Maryland, not many people will experience the building straight on from Maryland. You're either coming up east or west. And so on the west side, you can see right into that plaza and the retail there. And then on the east side towards downtown, you see coming into the whole bank of balconies purposefully placed. faces that way because again the views are east and west not necessarily north and then the retail corresponds to that and you get this this nice what i think will be a nice little plaza entrance you see actually a lot of these in downtown clayton because of the topography because it's so hilly there are a lot of buildings that have little sunken plaza entrances like this Um, it's so it's the width of a parking garage. So that's 120 feet, 125. Yeah. Well, no, it's less than that because it cuts of the corner. It'd be 120 feet all the way from corner to corner because that's the width of a garage like this is probably maybe 125. But you're back 20 feet from the corner. So that's about 100 feet right there.

Any further comments? Well, we do have a staff recommendation to approve with the following conditions that Ryan has already gone over. Are you in agreement with the two? I apologize.

Can you read them to me?

Number one, the applicant shall record a deed restriction noting that of the stormwater detention BMP and shall submit proof of the filing prior to the issuance of a building permit. Two, the proposal shall be revised to include three bicycle parking spaces as part of the building permit submission. Yes.

Okay.

I move to approve as submitted with the two staff recommendations. Second.

All in favor?

We can move on to the architectural review. And Ryan, we'll start there.

UPP is proposing the replacement of a surface parking lot with a mixed-use commercial and residential structure. The structure would reach six stories in height, taller than the residential structures to the south, however the size of the proposal is appropriate for development along Maryland Avenue for the Clayton 2040 comprehensive plan and Maryland Gateway overlay district. The structure would comprise brick, smooth concrete, CMUs, and metal on the facades. Staff are of the opinion that the materials are compatible with both nearby residential and commercial structures. Staff recommend approval is submitted.

You can certainly pass those around if you want later. So architecturally, the entire theme of this building architecturally is how do we cap the neighborhood and pull its language into a transition into another district? Um, as I mentioned before, we're, we're straddling and you, you brought this up, Steve, we're in the C2 district here. And, um, excuse me, C2, um, does allow for different, certainly height is big thing, right? It allows seven stories. Seven stories is quite different than the R3 or four. I can't remember that where it's next to it. I think it's four, right? Yeah. R4, which is a three and a half story, 45 feet. That's what all those other buildings are. So this is about twice. Well, it is literally twice the height kind of thing in two districts. So how do you do that in a way that is sensitive? So we're pulling a lot of the language out of the neighborhood. And it's fortunate that we have been working in the neighborhood long enough to kind of be engrossed in those patterns and designing in them and know what that language is. And so I'm going to explain to you what we're doing. I've already mentioned the sidewalk certainly as part of the landscape, the greenery or the feel coming down. In this image, you can see that With the building next door, this sidewalk is where it will be in the future, not where it is today. But keeping that tree lawn that's part of the pattern in the neighborhood and pulling that all the way up here to the driveway, which allows greenery both sides of it and helps to really kind of pull together these sites. The big garden in the back starts to set up the language of the front and the backyard. The rest of the buildings have these little private backyard gardens that are created all the way down the block if you walk out in there, actually. If it wasn't for all the trees that were planted in there, you'd sense this kind of pattern. So that's the reason why, again, the L shape. The language of the building, I've already described this a little bit. There's the underground garage for the residents, the upper garage for the retail, and this says ramp here, but it's a very, very small increase because of the slope of the hill again. We're pretty close to the sidewalk. Okay. And then beyond that, you get into the actual units, which start on what I would call the second floor of what you're going to perceive. And that's where that roof garden is in the back. This is very much like the crescent, if you know the back of the crescent, very same pattern. And then units on up, there's six per floor. The balconies were studied too much, I can tell you, immensely in terms of views. What are the best views? And then the feel of the building on the outside. I've already mentioned these two. Here, the east and the west are the orientation is along Maryland because that's what you want to see. When you're on there, you already did it. You want to look down Maryland, right? So these balconies are very intentionally turning the corner like that, mimicking the retail plazas down below. this one being, of course, the prime corner unit. Then around the rest of the building, you've got units that face, and I'm on the wrong floor because that's a penthouse floor, but you've got units to the west here, which are very much about the street along Maryland. You've got this corner in the back, which is that's a fantastic view to the south and east. That's your downtown skyline looking down Brentwood, basically. And you'll see Shaw Park from there as well and the rest of the neighborhood. Then this unit is the Primo view, also the largest unit. So they get the garden and looking straight at the downtown skyline. So all of these orientations were thought about for a long time, which is why the units are a little bit oddly shaped. It's not just cutting it into six equal spots. The penthouse then follows, but the units are larger. I talked about the character of the neighborhood. This is the very first building that I designed in the Topton Brighton neighborhood back in 2001 or two. So it's getting older now. And at the time, there were a lot of the older small buildings left. And so it was how, what's the language of this neighborhood going to be in the future? We all knew that it was going to be redeveloped. So the idea that I thought was appropriate is the Italian Palazzo. That was where the language came from very much a block kind of building with a grid of windows, a lot of repeated rhythm and, but then a strong line at the top of the second floor. So you have a base to the building that's a different material, you pattern up for two floors, you create a really strong line and then a floor at the top that's different. And it starts to break up the building into the classical base capital shaft motif. the roof up above. And then the other language is this kind of over-scaled entry, this kind of big feature on the building that says entrance and gives it a character. And it might be flanked with some little patterned windows. And I bring that up because that language was then used over and over in all of the buildings that I've done. This is the previous one for Mark. This is the first one that he did in the neighborhood at 23 Brighton. Again, you'll see that same pattern. See, this one's a longer building, so it's split in half and it creates another little bit of language that we're going to pick up on, which is mass gap that is balcony and then mass again. So that's what you see here. Again, you can see the kind of over-scaled entry. In this case, it's separated with a window above and that strong line at the top of the second floor with the base. The pearl, which is the latest one that we've done follows the same pattern. You see the entry, you see the strong line. That third floor is different, has some brick patterning and then the roof. This one has an introduction of a bay window, which was something new, which is also another thing that we wanted to pick up on. So all of those ideas were then brought into the language of this. How do we transition? When you look at the street elevation, I put the pearl in here. Again, this will be future. Three stories with two levels that are the same on a base, and then that third level changes character. So in our building, we start off that same way. Put a strong base in, put a two-story volume in here that is one character, have a strong line that then transitions to that next floor and starts the new character, whatever it is. That gives us, in this instance – the cursor keeps disappearing – The roof line is then the next strong piece. You have the top of the second floor, and then you have the roof. Those create your zones. So it was important to add a really strong band right here that aligns with the roof of the rest of the neighborhood. I know it's not a perfect alignment here, but that's because we're uphill. But that scale... is the scale of the neighborhood up to that line. So that's important to pick up on that. Beyond that line then becomes the scale of this new district and our patterning then stretches on up, but we sort of play on the motif at a taller scale by doing the same thing. Now the base, what was the two story becomes the base of the big building All of this becomes the middle ground of all that. And the top floor becomes that band that repeats up here. So do you see how it works? It's a two-scale repeat of the pattern, base, middle, top. We do it down low in a small scale to match the neighborhood. We do it at a grand scale to match the scale of this building. And you get both of those together. The rest of the elevation is taking up on the pattern of splitting the masses. You've got these masses that go here, blocks, and I'll show you a rendering of this so it looks more in the future. A mass with a bay window and a terrace, then the mass with the terrace and the bay window, then the mass. That is the kind of repeated rhythm that goes down the block. I don't have a picture of it, but if you all know the building that faces Shaw Park at the very end, Park Plaza. I forget what it's called. Shaw Park Place something. That is the same. It's mass balcony, mass balcony. So that's the way I set it up there was a different pattern because it was facing the park. It needed something different. This faces or this is the cap on the other end of the neighborhood. So it follows that same pattern. So again, you can see trying to pick up a language that goes for the whole neighborhood, end to end, up and down the street, regardless of the scale. In other words, I've thought about this a lot. It's not random. Here's kind of a close-up of that character along the street. You may have noted in the previous photo of what's there today, they have a nice little planting flower garden on the corner. We can certainly continue that because we kept some green space in front of our wall for that. There's the raised plaza. That would be the dining. And then these curves, as they're down low, when you get up close to the building, you start to really experience them. You miss this when you're standing back. But it's a very dramatic kind of statement corner that's the signature piece. Has the entrance to the building for the residents right here. Has the big signature bay window and balconies going on up. We have brick patterning, the little special windows that indicate the entrance that you saw in the other buildings. It's all part of that, that same language. And since the Melmans like the pearl so much, there's a lot of the materials that I'm presenting down in front of you are the same materials from the pearls, same palette. A lot of the same kind of lines, detailing, striping, all that, even the bay windows is picked up. There's this view again looking up Maryland. And you can kind of see the difference in the character of what faces Topton, which is more these masses separated by balconies marching down the street in a rhythm versus what goes along Maryland, which is about the two ends, east and west glass on the two ends. You've seen this one before. What I'll point out here is the The roof garden plaza that we talked about before up there, this gives you an idea of its proximity to the parking at Straub's. It's raised up about probably 15 feet above the parking, which is nice because it hides the cars then from the residents and makes their parking lot look a little bit more built in rather than just sitting on the ground. And then our parking garage for retail is back behind that. So all the retail parking ends up on the same level as it always has been, almost like the same continued lot. This is also a good view to point out that strong band that I was talking about on the third floor. Again, remember our two-story base, our third floor that's different and how it lines up with the roof. You can see the roof of the Pearl in the back there, how all of that's one kind of zone for the neighborhood. And then this end cap is allowed to grow past it. That's the main kind of signature view down the street. And, Steve, you can still very much see these buildings up the street here, up the block. That's a view from the back corner looking out on the plaza so you can get a sense of that interior scale. And you can also see how the driveway slopes down into the lower garage right there. Looking up Topton, this again was to kind of highlight, here's the Pearl building. two stories the different third floor band and that roof how it carries out to this band goes on up and then this building which um in the future will be up at the scale of the pearl and really start to fill it in connect the dots and there's that view along topton and for some reason it stopped advancing

A question. Between the retail garage and the driveway that goes down, are those just screened? Is that a screened parking garage?

Yes.

Yeah, okay.

Yes, it's an open parking garage, so we have open requirements front and back, but we didn't want to just see into the cars, so what we're doing there is putting a screen in between that would be permeable, but... block it visually. That screen material at the present is proposed to be a, we've used this before, it's a large-scale CMU unit that is like stone. It looks like a stone block. So we create this kind of stone paneled wall with slots in it. That's what you're seeing here. There are a lot of different things that that could be in terms of a screen, but that's where we're proposing for the moment.

I don't know why. Oh, there it goes. So the garage, the lower level for the residents, that's going to have to be pretty well ventilated because it's sealed, pretty sealed.

Yes, which is typical of condo buildings. That garage wants to be an enclosed garage because it's also heated. So it's different than the retail garage, which is allowed to be open.

I'm going to be tearing up.

Like to do a lot of brick patterning, that's the way to break it. All that kind of actually this material. Oh, that is used.

So it's smooth. I

want

to weather.

But rather than using actual...

Well, the opening is large also. That's on the Topton side. Yeah. Yeah.

That creates another horizontal band that brings the scale down because the opening doesn't need to be that tall and all that. But it also mimics kind of the look of an awning that you might get on a retail stretch. And that's metal, same as the roof, the penthouse floor and the balconies and all that material.

Well, Tyler, I like it. I think what really works is your use of the typology that's in the neighborhood and the materials and everything just seem to fit together.

Okay. That was the goal. So I'm glad you can see that.

Let's see if

anyone disagrees.

Now, I agree. I like it. I like your use of materials, keeping it in the masonry and then the brick patterning. One thing is I look at it kind of from Steve's comment about the Maryland elevation. Could you pull back the storefront and create a walk?

Oh, you mean like a colonnade?

Yeah. And then if you don't get stores that will need that much square footage, it gives the opportunity for a smaller shop.

Actually, it's interesting you mentioned that because I love colonnades. And I've proposed them on several different designs on retail streets like that. And in this particular building, you said smaller retail, which is one solution. But I will tell you that This level, which you're looking at here, the parking is a lot more than we need. In fact, by code, we need zero because these are less than 3,000 square feet. Now, we don't want to do zero, of course, because that's not good for retail. But we have parking we could give, and you could pull that back. and create a colonnade there, and stretch your retail more in. I can't move the elevator core, so it's not like the whole thing would shift over. But you'd start to get a little bit different. I don't know, this space would grow back in, and this would get smaller. It would get amorphous a little bit, but it could be done. Or as you suggest, these could just be smaller retail spaces. At some point, I mean, 3,000 square feet is a really good size for a restaurant. So at some point you get too small, and then it's not a restaurant anymore. It's a sandwich shop, which maybe there's need for that too. I don't know. But the biggest reason why I did not go with a colonnade here, there are two things. One, Maryland is not a walking street. It is when you get past Brentwood. But down on this end, it's just I don't see a lot of people walking down Maryland past Straub's. Straub's is for the wonder that Straub's is, and I love it. But that curved corner really creates an impediment to walking. And I've walked that area a lot because I used to be right there in Clayton. And it's very difficult to cross the street from there. downtown to Straub's. So not being a pedestrian street and then taking your retail and hiding it behind a colonnade will often kill retail. I can point to several in Kirkwood where they kind of forced that, a colonnade, and those retail spaces are all empty because there's something about being in a colonnade that you can't see the retail as well. You can't see in the glass. It looks hidden. I only have seen colonnades work well in Florida. And I don't know why it works in Florida, but they sit outside and it's beautiful weather and all that. It's a little different around here. So that's why we didn't do the colonnade.

Okay. I actually was having a question about signage in terms of retail. I know signage is... pretty sensitive and well-worn topic, but to the success of the retail, they will care a lot. So that will obviously come at a separate permitting At some point. I mean, that isn't now.

Yes, the sign package will come later. You're right. And honestly, I don't know exactly where the best places to put the signs are. But off the top of my head, my first inkling is because we're moving the entrances around the corner, the signs probably work better facing east and west than they do facing Maryland directly.

Yeah, it's beautiful. And after listening to you, I think I understand more why it's beautiful. We're lucky to have your thinking and all of you in our community. The only comment I have is similar to what you were saying. And the pedestrian street, you kind of hit it. I'm thinking about this and the opera theater and the high school and everything else and the building out so far and the safety, too, of the sidewalks and everything else with it. just right there with the cars and it not being that walkable. And maybe do we want to keep playing into that or do we want to make it a safer, more welcoming area for the retail and for just the gathering? Because there will be people on the streets there if this goes as you certainly anticipate it will.

It's a question that I've tried to figure out the answer to, which is why on the east side of Brentwood, where you have... Well, starting at the other end of the corner, which is the – what's the big restaurant there that has the – well, I was talking to the other side. What used to be Herbie – it's Herbie's now. What was it called back in the day? We used to go there after college. Cardwell's, yes. That was the hangout spot when I was in Wash U. Why is it that that block, the buildings are right on the sidewalk – And the sidewalk is the standard width of Clayton, has the tree wells, has everything we're talking about here. And it's very walkable. People walk that sidewalk all the time. And they don't feel in danger to being hit by cars. But when you get to the other side of Brentwood, that character completely changes. Why is that? The speed of traffic, I think, is probably part of it. People drive pretty fast until they get to Brentwood and then they slow down for some reason. For some reason, if you just look at that architecturally, a lot of people argue that when the streets are narrower and the buildings are closer in, people slow down. When you push buildings back with a lot of parking lots or green space in front, which is a very suburban model, the street becomes much more of a highway. So you could make the argument pulling this building up slows down the traffic maybe to a degree. We hope that's the theory anyway. And then the street doesn't feel quite so dangerous. If Clayton did a road diet and added parking along the curb and reduced the lane width down, that would be way better.

Parking does a lot,

yeah.

Tyler, picking up on what Helen said, not a colonnade that you would walk under, but if the glass were set back two feet, which would allow for a planter bed to be between the recessed glass and the sidewalk just might soften it up a bit. I agree. The Vista, but it'll soften it up along the street.

Yeah, I agree. I think that's a good comment. I don't think there's anything wrong with us pulling the glass in. Um, Yeah, certainly.

Other comments?

Well, first, discussing like Italian palazzos and string courses, you mentally deposited me back in a history of cultural environments tests like at school, which I had a momentary panic attack there. But I appreciate all the thought that went into it. Visually, kind of how things go. I think the building overall is a beautiful building. My comments are... It should be more like questions. My questions, and I don't know if this goes to you or the Melman of choice. As far as the two retail spaces... I know my concern with other buildings that I've seen in Clayton is to get this mixed use. The retail is almost kind of tacked on and then you see a lot of that retail just like sit vacant. Looking at this, this seems to be much more considered. So with that, I want to know kind of like the type of tenants you envision going in these two spaces. And then on top of that, how these spaces are going to be marketed and what what I guess you guys are going to do as a team to get these filled so five years from now when we're driving down and seeing this beautiful building, they're not just papered over?

Well, one of you want to answer

that? I think the vision, of course, is on the corner is a restaurant. And 3,000 square feet is the right size. And just mentioning it and showing the pictures to restaurateurs, there's just a number more ready that have said, I would like more information. So if you picture where it is, of course, across from the opera theater, the outdoor space, the parking, it has so many other elements that some of the other fine restaurants don't have. And without mentioning names, I don't think that's an issue. That's going to be a problem at all. I think we'll be, they'll be in line wanting this space because it's going to be just a beautiful, beautiful restaurant. As far as the retail going up Maryland, it can be just a number of things today. It's all a lot of healthcare. You know, there could be you know, it could be a fitness facility there, although there's, there's the Clayton, the Clayton center. It could be, you know, just a number of Things. I mean, you look at the Crescent, what we've done at the Crescen, it's, it's, There's going to be a lot of that. We're very proud of the retail space. It's filled at the Crescent. It's been filled since day one. It's 22 years later, and it's still filled. So I think we'll market it. We'll promote it in the way that we'll get the right tenants, whatever that's going to be. But I don't think it's going to be office. I think it's going

Maybe that the melman family has or other local developer have is when we're in this Community, these are people, these are the people that we live with work with socialize with. And that's kind of the difference we're not out of town or even out of Community owners, we know these people, and I think that we care about that and we they know us and they know our reputation. And so much of business, as we all know, is relationships. And I think we try to use that, obviously, to our advantage. And I think that kind of distinguishes ourselves from other developers, again, maybe local in St. Louis, but don't have the ties to Clayton in and of itself. A relationship goes a long way.

And certainly, I think we'd all agree, if these retail spaces were filled, that's going to help sell those condo units. It's just something, like I said, overall that we see, and I... Once again, looking at these plans, I think that these spaces seem more considered than ones that you would tend to see sit vacant for longer. But I think when we're talking about vibrancy, we're talking about obviously a lot that could be going on kind of in this area, like having a strong retail presence there. Retail will obviously beget other retail. I just wanted to make sure there was a strong plan in place there for that.

I hope I'm not speaking on a turn here, but I believe we weren't required for retail. And I know that's been a lot of a big part of Clayton's history is we need more retail. We need more retail. Let's kind of insist that some of these new developments have the retail. And so then it kind of became an afterthought for the developer, I think, a lot of the time because it was just a meat to require. It wasn't to include retail. Okay.

Thank you. I had questions also about the ADA. I knew following two architects, it would never get to me. So that's been definitely covered. Yeah, I appreciate the phase two teaser. Pass that. I don't have any other questions.

Tyler, I think about how a three-year-old can draw a box and add rectangles and squares to it and call it a building. And it is so refreshing to hear the intentionality behind your design. And even bringing up things that I had not considered. I love the idea of the band of stone aligning up with both the Phase II teaser, as Jim says, and the pearl as well. Something I hadn't noticed and really greatly appreciate. I look forward to walking down and I do walk along there. I look forward to having dinner there. I think this is a beautiful building. I would ask, can you take me through your design thinking when I look at that northwest corner right on the convex section of your S-curve there? You've got those windows, that five windows there. What's the intentionality behind kind of the how you've laid out those there, and just give me your thinking on that.

Certainly. Well, for starters, it's a curved wall. Let's just start there. And the units, the challenge of designing condos, which we've always found, is you want it to be beautiful on the outside, but it's also got to house units that people want to live in on the inside. And that's different than an office building. An office building is easy. ribbon and glass, and you just set up desks. It doesn't matter. These are, there are rooms and things in there. And that particular corner is a transition between the two bars between the up and down Maryland and down Topton. So it's actually the transition between two units. It's kind of like where two units come together. So it's a challenging space to put a lot of glass. It's not a living room. It's not even a big bedroom. It's not the kind of place that warrants a lot of glass, and so we wanted to use the fact that this is the entrance. This is the residential entrance to the building, and going back to that pattern I said of these grandiose large-scale entrances, to really pull that up the whole face We've got the glass at the bottom, which will take you into the lobby. The second floor, you'll notice the stone. That's all part of it too. That's just begging for a sign that says the RK in Clayton, which you might see later in a sign permit package. And then the... This pattern of special windows, which we've used before to indicate visually entrance. It says something different about the building. And those work well, actually, in these transition spaces. I can tell you what's inside there is a... Well, it used to be a bathroom. I can't remember now the latest floor plans. It was bathrooms, right? I think that... I think it's the secondary bathroom of one of the units. And so you can have these wonderful little playful windows in a bathroom like that where you wouldn't have a big sheet of glass and it works better on a curved surface too. So all of those things are what we've come up with to come together on the main level of why, but then the, the playful design side of it is to this kind of, there's a lot of moves in this building that had to do with, uh, the, uh, I don't know exactly what the words are, but the celebratory fun aspect of downtown Clayton. This is where you go to have dinner. You know, it's like your night out. You go there for Christmas parties at various big law firms and whatnot. And so there are a lot of moves in this building that reflect that. And this is one of them, which you can see the brick patterning on here. We're starting to play with this. It's heavy at the bottom and it kind of fizzles out as it goes to the top. much like a champagne glass bubbles, yes. And the windows do the same thing. They're kind of coming up. So all of that is a secondary subtle thing that you won't pick up at first till you see the building several times and you'll start, that looks like this to me. That to me is the artistic side of architecture.

Yeah, that's the first thing that really popped to me was that idea of that effervescence. And I didn't know if that was intentional. I think it's very successful. And I really, this is, I think one of the few buildings that we've seen in the last couple of meetings where I'm really excited to see this one come up because of the history behind just the intentionality of the building. And this is one that I'm glad to be on the council at this point too. can envision 20 years down the road saying i remember sitting in when this was discussed and uh when the architect was talking about why he chose those things so thank you thank you

um i like all the steel but i actually thought the answer to the windows and the curb was going to be a nod to the famous bar building on the side of clayton it is a good yes yes

that's yes that too

some people don't like that building so i just yeah i i think it looks great i mean i'm not going to add anything to what they said looks cool thanks

well if there are no further comments maybe we need a motion the staff is recommending approval as submitted

I would like to ask, are we moving back the windows along Maryland?

Do you want that to be a prerequisite of your approval?

I would like

it. Put

it in the motion.

To get some relief of some dimension, and I don't mean six inches, but I can't promise 10 feet either. Some dimension. Two feet. Yeah, to allow some depth.

Okay.

I didn't clear that with my associate Amanda here. Megan online.

That will come from that is the columns.

Oh, right, right, right. Yeah, the columns can't move back. Well, they can. Can? Yeah. We'll work on it. We do want to very much keep this column on the corner. This is a signature piece of the whole building. So that won't change. But beyond that, yeah, there are some other columns that we'll need to deal with. Decide whether it looks better to have them outside the glass or keep them inside the glass where they are now and they move in a little bit and it's cantilevered. I don't know. Our structural engineer will argue. It's darker. Yeah, we don't want to do it a lot. No.

Look at the.

Yeah, that's the one I was thinking of. It's vacant.

I don't know if it would need to be both retail spaces either. I mean, I think the retail space one, saying that 3,000 square feet for a restaurant does make sense. I don't necessarily see a need to push it back visually for that portion because you have the nice patio on that corner. I definitely agree with pushing back the retail portion of retail two, pushing back the windows of retail space two. But I don't know if that's possible from a design standpoint to have one pushback. I've

got lots of ideas in my head. Anything's possible. It's going to be great. Trust me. I would leave it up to the

designers.

Just because we're doing this a little bit on the fly, which is a little different, I don't know. I was trying to find quickly a measurement if you have – because there is roughly a foot or so of space right now between the glazing and your property line. That's right. So my question was going to be if we had enough to fit our standard streetscape. If you can't achieve this setback of further of glass without creating a cascade of impacts, would the board still be interested in maybe just converting that existing strip that they have right now to the planter bed? Or is it really that you want the wall to move? I'm just trying to get an idea for better options before having to send them back to you. Yeah.

What she's getting at, just for clarification, see the sidewalk right here? The standard Clayton Street escape does not go all the way up to the building. We went ahead and ran it all the way to the building just for retail consistency. We don't have to. We could stop it and have a strip of grass and flowers and liriope that dies and stuff like that along there too. Yeah.

I sort of like the idea that the glass would be in a different plane than the brick above it. But if it doesn't work, any little greenery we can get would be okay.

Yeah. I got an idea that's going to work great.

Yeah.

I just don't want to tell you what it is. You

shook

your head.

It's

going to be great.

Okay. I will move to approve as submitted. Okay.

trust you

with

i'm sorry

the provision that the pulling back the glass from the brick line above will be explored along with planting between the sidewalk and the face

second

all in favor All right. Opposed? Okay, one is groundbreaking. That's not my department.

Well, good luck with it. It'll be an exciting addition. And by then we may know what's going on on the Calera site. Okay, thank you. Well, we've come to the end of one of our longer meetings. Darren, do you have any comments?

Steve, do you want to make sure? I don't know if the attendee online is the item. Oh, she's with you? Okay. All right. Never mind then. We do still have the one other item on the agenda that we will need to do something.

Yeah, I think we need to table 7811 Clayton Road also. Okay.

Okay, I move to table 7811 Clayton Road until a date can be decided.

May I ask one question about this? If we're tabling this, does this mean that they're continuing to kind of be in flagrant disregard for the sign approval? I didn't completely understand all of this one, but I just want to make sure that we're not running... write into kind of what they want by tabling this and them continuing not showing up for this.

Are

we having a problem? So they're currently in court for this matter already, in municipal court. So I would prefer to have the applicant present given the context of this discussion. That's just my preference from staff's point of view.

As far as, I understand that definitely for this meeting. Let's just say we're two, three meetings in the future and no one shows up. Would we be able to consider it without the applicant here?

Yep. And their failure to appear tonight will also be part of the record for their next court appearance in municipal court.

In the short term, I agree with you that we should wait if possible.

Would you like to just continue it to the next meeting date certain so that it definitely appears on that agenda rather than giving them the option of when they appear on the next agenda?

I revise my motion to table until the next meeting, which is January 5th. Second.

All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Okay. Darren, you were, you had nothing else. Chris?

Happy holidays to you all. Jim? Happy holidays. See everyone in 2026. Susan?

Same. Everybody enjoyed the time. Ditto.

Same for me. Ryan?

So there are gifts probably by way of Brad Goss. Susan, can you explain who Brad Goss is and his role in sustainability?

Brad is the intern for the Sustainability Advisory Committee. Brad is a retired leading attorney in the area, and he's doing this sustainability as getting a degree or master's or associates through St. Louis Community College, which has one of the strongest programs around. And he has been a great asset to us. He's talked with the committee. done a lot of research on the types of trees we should be planting and the cornerstone species and how they build things out. And he's also then provided us with this book on, what's the name of it again, Ryan?

Nature's Best Hope.

Yeah, Nature's Best Hope, and so it's, yeah, he's a great, great brain, great commitment, great person to have involved with the work that we're doing. We appreciate it, and this is a gift from him, so that's great.

Thank you. Very nice.

Yeah, and it's also kind of kicking off one of the projects Ryan's leading this fiscal year, which is a review of our tree and landscape requirements. So we'll hear from Brad, you all will hear from Brad a version of his presentation, correct?

I believe that's actually going to be scheduled for the first meeting.

Yeah. So you'll, you'll get an update on what he's been doing for sustainability and then Ryan will kind of pick off, pick up where he's left off and take us into the regulations of private property.

I'm pretty darn sure that you're going to be really impressed and really it's really, it's really an interesting and important topic that he, that he knows well. So.

Well, thank you, Mr. O'Keefe, for joining us. Hope you were entertained tonight.