Imagine you’re a self-storage business owner with a challenging site: a canal on one side and a residential community on the other. You need a three-story building to accommodate your storage clients, yet the residents don’t want a towering edifice right next door.

Solution? Go underground.

The site’s advantage was that it was lower than the street it fronts, so the three stories read more like a one-and-a-half facility from the street view. Thankfully, this design met the needs of the business and the homeowners. In fact, we had no neighborhood opposition, and we rezoned the site without any issues!

We chose the building materials to minimize the typical “industrial look” of storage facilities. We included locally manufactured stone to replicate sandstone and incorporated stucco and painted masonry to soften the large facility’s exterior. The glass and steel highlights provide visual interest at the building’s corners.