Planning Commission Agenda and Packet 2015 12 10

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Planning Commission Meeting Minutes November 12, 2015 Page 9 of 41 animate that end of Downtown. We are hopeful that the types of tenants we can attract for this site will be the kinds that will animate the street. We are providing amenities in the courtyard area which we feel is an important area. It could be all kinds of things such as a restaurant or a market, and would be a place to go eat a sandwich or a meal. What the courtyard does is respect the house and gives it some open space. An aerial picture from the Museum to the south shows the existing house with the garage removed. We received approval from the Historic Preservation Commission (HPC) for demolition of the garage. We would retain the rest of the house. The house provides authenticity to the site and it ties the site back into the history of the people who lived there. We used some of the design cues from the existing house such as the gabled roof form in the design of the new building. We wanted to break up the mass of the building so the elements are in segments that don't exceed 35'. When you look at Downtown and look at Louisville in general, we are an organic community. If you look at the new towns around the country that are built all at once, there is a homogeneous quality to the buildings and to the texture of the community. What I like, and what a lot of people might not put their finger on, is that Louisville grew up in a very organic way with different factors pushing development in different ways along the years. We felt this new building Should really have that sort of organic quality that grew out of necessity. You can imagine differentilding periods which are reminiscent of some of our other buildings in town. Regarding desi gn,guidelines with planning staff and some of the things that have come up are "we don't want any complex roof forms" or "no curved elements" in Downtown. Clearly, we have a lot of complex roof forms and we have curved elements, historic and otherwise. Looking at some of the buildings existing today such as right across the street, there are multiple gables, many different kinds of roofs such as on the Jordinelli house that was moved onto the museum site, the Melting Pot, and the Black Diamond Car Wash building. LuLu's Restaurant and the Rev show some of the most expressive conglomeration of organic architecture l have ever seen locally. Some people may hate it but I love it because it really is grown out of necessity, and you can see all of these different building periods. Certainly we have curved elements at entry ways on historic buildings, such as the old mortuary building downtown and the addition next to it. Look at Zucca and the Huckleberry which was the bank originally. Complex roof forms are not really foreign to Downtown Louisville. That is who we are and I don't think the design guidelines say you shouldn't have these kind of elements. I am confused at the comments and say, "I don't agree with them ". Another comment that took me off -guard is that we are criticized for our sidewalk seating in thatzit.' privatizes public space" and I think we should encourage it. If you look around town at the privatization of public space, those are some of the most successful people places. We have the cafe seating outside our restaurants. Certainly a huge thing is the patios in the summertime. That is about, the biggest privatization of public space in the country. I don't know why we would be criticized for that or have points taken off of our design for that. We are not happy to get rid of it but if we have to, we will. It seems odd that we would be criticized for it. The design guidelines are not dogma and they are not put there as hard and fast rules, they are simply guidelines. I think we shouldn't cherry -pick certain things and say, don't do this, do that. Just generally, look at the designs and see if they fit. The one thing that is in the code is that our transition area is 35' height limit, two stories. We have proposed a three story building with a 35' height limit. In doing so, we are setting the third floor back from Main Street and back from South Street. We are complying with the FAR of 1.3. We are complying with the height of 35'. I think you will see places where our height is listed as 38'. We have an elevator that needs to get to the third floor to serve the loft and less thanl % of floor area does need to extend above the roof for the elevator over -run. Otherwise, we can't have an elevator to that floor. We think it is important from an ADA standpoint to allow the exception or waiver for that one small element. Everything else complies with the 35'. If we were to do a two -story compliant building, we would take our 1.3 FAR and we would spread it out differently on the site. With the goal of trying to keep the house in place, we would slam up against the east wall of the house and eliminate the courtyard to create the same FAR. We felt that our design of compressing the footprint, even if that popped the third floor up, was actually a good design and it provided design amenities and