Glen Lennox Stories: Developing for The Future

As the country remains in the midst of a national health crisis that could change the way business is conducted, developer Clay Grubb has pressed on with a state-of-the-art office building in the Glen Lennox complex his company is rebuilding and renovating.

The four-story Gwendolyn is part of the mixed-used community in phase one of the 50-year-old neighborhood, one of the most distinct housing developments in North Carolina. It was built after World War II to accommodate the influx of veteran students to UNC, and the tree-lined streets and grassy areas are not seen in most duplex and tri-plex complexes.

“It’s an interesting time and the jury is clearly still out on which way office demand will go,” Grubb told Chapelboro.com. “We are actually still seeing office leases, but it’s primarily larger companies coming out of the urban markets and consolidating to be near where their folks want to live. And right now, it’s not as appealing to live in New York City and San Francisco and Washington, DC. That makes towns like Chapel Hill significantly more appealing.

“And therefore, a property like the Gwendolyn may be more desirable today especially with Chapel Hill and its amenities of green space, a great school system and just the overall quality of life. So, something like the Gwendolyn has gotten more attractive as a result of what’s happening in the world, even though in general there will probably be less office demand nationally. We think products like this will actually be in greater demand.”

Since the Gwendolyn is in mid-construction, Grubb Properties has had time to adjust interior floor plans and designs to match what looks like a new normal for indoor office space. Some amenities were already included, while others have been added to reflect the preference for more spatial layouts.

“Obviously, people will want more distance from desk to desk and open floor plans, as opposed to cramming everybody together,” Grubb said. “The major changes are obviously a lot more attention to the HVAC system and the quality of the air that comes in and out. Fortunately, that was something we had prioritized in all of our buildings. And so the upgrades we need as a result of COVID weren’t significant, although we certainly went back through that. And then the other aspect is the amount of outdoor space that’s available. People want to be able to get outdoors and have more outdoor seating.”

A coffee shop was originally planned for the Gwendolyn, but that space has been supersized to have what Grubb calls “coffee cafes” by doubling the indoor square footage and creating more outdoor patio space.

“The fitness facility is probably about three times larger than we typically would put in,” he said. “But we think that people want space when you’re working out, and six feet doesn’t always feel like enough, so you want to have more. While we’ve put more emphasis on those amenities and put more emphasis on outdoor space and the quality of the HVAC, the entries now are being upgraded so that they’re all touchless. You can get in and out of the buildings without having to touch anything. Our access today is just waving your phone, which is a pretty cool.”

As for cool, the Gwendolyn will further upgrade what Grubb Properties has been doing for years with air conditioning, bringing in more outside air than recycling what is already in the system, an option that most automobiles have today.

“That’s a great analogy and I would be hesitant to get a lot more technical because that is out of my expertise,” Grubb said. “The difference was 15 years ago, they basically got rid of that outside air option in facilities. And now it’s back and just purely accelerated that, hey, you want all outside air coming in. With recycling air, the theory behind that was because it was cheaper, and bringing air in from outside wasn’t always clean air.

“But today’s technology is so much greater that we’re seeing both savings in efficiency as well as the quality of air is also arguably better outside, even though the current administration has been trying to reverse that. A lot of areas where our offices are located have been cleaned up today. We’ve still got a long way to go, but we’ve made huge strides.”

The Gwendolyn is named for Gwendolyn Harrison, the first African-American woman undergraduate student at UNC. Grubb and his company are proponents of recapturing history rather than just building over it. But it wasn’t that way in early planning.

“When we first embarked down the path of trying to do something with Glen Lennox, I personally was not supportive about it,” Grubb admitted. “I had a lot of pressure from other team members and investors that, hey, we need you to do something. And, finally, I kind of acquiesced. They came up with a plan that I think was a great plan if Glen Lennox were a 70-acre greenfield sitting on a corner and you want a new urbanistic type of environment. Then, when everybody came out with their “Save Glen Lennox” t-shirts and saveGlenlennox.org website, we sat down and really started talking to residents. We realized that the culture of Glen Lennox was too wonderful, not to stay.

“It was arguably among the best brands of any apartment community that existed in the Carolinas, if not one of the top brands, just from the shopping center and the neighborhood. And that’s when we realized this is something we need to build on, not something that you want to get rid of and just start over.

“People like nice new buildings and nice new apartments and nice offices and nice new restaurants, but at the end of the day you can go anywhere to get those. People want authenticity, they’re tired of the Disney-fying — I hate to pick on Disney because they’re a great company — but they kicked off this with Celebration, its first urbanism community.

“In hindsight, that’s what is getting destroyed right now. We were seeing a trend away from that, and now it’s completely gone. Nobody goes to the chain retail stores anymore. You’re either an authentic local cheese store, bakery, and you’re thriving because you’re catering to something that people really want or you’re a chain and basically going bankrupt. I think we’ve had 27 of them go bankrupt this year already.

“The history of Glen Lennox and the history of Chapel Hill is too great, even looking at the shopping center and its architecture was really post-modern era in the ‘50s that set up a trend. And so we’re building a new clubhouse that is really mimicking the original shopping center’s architecture, and I’m real excited with how that’s turned out. I think it looks fantastic. And we went down to the details of even using recycled brick and recycled wood from the existing apartments and existing trees to just reinforce that, hey, this is not something that’s just going to be on the shelf and look good for a couple of years.

“We’re building something that 60 years from now, people will still be proud of. I use the analogy of the Ralph Lauren polo shirt, which may be good on day one,  but you never liked it as much the first year you owned it as you did the seventh and eighth and 10th year, when it had character. So the reality is we’re really focusing on building something that has character that will actually improve with age, as opposed to so much development by merchant builders that are trying to maximize today’s dollar and move on down the road and not really worry about five and 10 years from now, what it will looks like and how it operates and how it fits in.”

Grubb doesn’t want to build “just another shiny object, where the shine goes away pretty quick.”

“Glen Lennox Stories” is a series on Chapelboro sponsored by Grubb Properties