SAN RAFAEL -- A prominent Terra Linda hilltop feature for four decades could become home to seniors rather than office workers under a plan to convert the 131,000-square-foot building to housing.
If brought to fruition, One Thorndale would be a novel move for some of the older North Bay commercial space that has been vacant for years and amounting to as much as a quarter of rentable office space in certain submakets. Conversions of offices to residences happened in San Francisco after the dot-com bust emptied buildings. More recently, there have been notable office conversions in the Boston area and northern New Jersey.
[caption id="attachment_82119" align="alignleft" width="350"] The One Thorndale vacant office building on a San Rafael hilltop is being remarketed for 77 senior apartments. (image credit: Cornish & Carey Commercial Newmark Knight Frank)[/caption]
Sausalito-based Berg Holdings Corp. (415-289-4924, bergholdings.com), which owns the vacant One Thorndale Drive building, wants to create 77 age-restricted flats on all three floors, rather than the current configuration of offices on the top floor and part of the second plus parking in the remainder, according to Tennis "JT" Wick, a principal with the firm. The conceptual floorplan calls for a cafe on the first floor, fitness center on the second floor and meeting rooms on the top floor. The existing outside parking lot on the 5.36-acre property would be expanded to move cars out of the building and mostly off the street.
"The building has been vacant for five years," Mr. Wick said. "I think we finally found a use that's going to work there."
Berg Holdings and an unnamed prospective senior-housing developer-operator met with city of San Rafael planning officials several months ago about the possibility of such a conversion.
Berg submitted a preapplication primer on the proposal to Planning Manager Raffi Boloyan on Thursday and plans to turn in a formal application early next year.[poll id="92"]
"When the city of San Rafael adopted the General Plan in 2004, to meet housing needs and mandates one of the things that was encouraged and zoned for was more residential uses in more commercial-use areas," said city Planning Manager Raffi Boloyan. The Association of Bay Area Governments in its 2014--2022 Regional Housing Needs Assessment said San Rafael needed to create 1,003 home dwellings for various income levels in that period.
That would allow multifamily-unit creation by right in an office-zoned area such as One Thorndale's. Depending on what Berg Holdings seeks in its formal application as far as external building modifications and other factors, a basic conversion could proceed to the building permit stage quickly, Mr. Boloyan said.
The three-story building at One Thorndale Drive has been vacant since Take-Two Interactive, formerly Sega Visual Concepts, and then Disney’s ImageMovers Digital animation studio moved to Hamilton Landing in Novato.
There had been interest from large tenants -- particularly, Kaiser Permanente and Marin General Hospital -- for much of the 70,000 to 80,000 square feet of available office space in the building in recent years, but those deals either fizzled or have stalled, according to Brian Eisberg, a longtime agent in the San Rafael office of Cornish & Carey Commercial Newmark Knight Frank. He and David Walwyn of the same brokerage have been marketing the property as office space and more recently as housing.
"It has been challenging to market as office," he said. "It's not as convenient an office location as competitors across the freeway, because they are right off the freeway and this one requires getting off the freeway and going behind the shopping center."
Yet the building's 360-degree views, proximity to shopping and health care, and its large atrium with retractable skylight make it a good choice for conversion to housing, particularly for older residents, according to Mssrs. Wick and Eisberg as well as project architect Tony Battaglia of Santa Rosa-based Archumana. The building overlooks Northgate shopping centers to the east and north, Kaiser Permanente San Rafael Medical Center to the west and Villa Marin, a 224-condominium assisted-living facility directly to the south.Housing conversion quandary
That sizable atrium is important and helps solve what is a common problem with potential conversions of commercial buildings to residential, according to Mr. Battaglia. Because of state building code requirements for daylight and fresh air in residential units, a home created from a commercial building often can only be 40 to 60 feet long from the window line of the building, he noted. A double-loaded corridor design, common in hotels and apartment buildings, allows a building to roughly 110 feet deep while providing windows to dwellings on both sides of the corridor.
