COMMERCIAL Real Estate Story by Aaron Michaels • Photos by Tom Kessler Morrissey Engineering’s new green corporate offices near 118th & Fort Street.
green is stillgold in
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design trends
hile the trendy elements in real estate design come and go over time, certain
styles and staples are timeless. Lots of natural light. Columns and arches. Temperature-controlled environments. Energy-efficient lighting. Workspace as well as meeting space. So when a business is searching for office or retail space to lease or buy, there are specific design factors that remain constant and always in demand. At the same time, as new options become available and popular — like energy-efficient technology, architectural advancement and variations in outdoor landscaping — the trends help shape design offerings and requests. The Lund Company, which markets and manages retail office, industrial, agricultural and multi-family properties, knows and responds to these businesses’ wants and needs. In their experience, many of these pertaining to design are inherent to business type as well as employee size and location. In a lease situation, the property manager — in this case, Lund — responds to requests from the leasee in terms of retrofitting the building, changing light fixtures or even just bulbs, or adjusting work cube size (or walls heights) to accommodate business and employee needs. “This can mean making larger cubes for fewer employees or smaller cubes to create more open space for gatherings or meetings. It all depends on the needs of that particular business,” said Martin Patzner, Vice President and Director of Commercial Property Management for Lund. “As a landlord, it’s all about creating the environment that works best for the tenant, and whatever designs or changes they want, we try our best to give them what they want.” One design trend — not aesthetic but functional — that remains very popular in both conversion and new construction properties is energy efficiency. With utilities taking a pretty 26
B2B Omaha Magazine • Fall 2011
hefty chunk out of the operating budgets of businesses and with costs continuing to increase, the more “green” the structure and heating and air conditioning systems are, the better. The same goes for lighting, where simple, inexpensive changes from fluorescent to LED and CFL bulbs and fixtures, which use a fraction of the same amount of energy and must be replaced less often, are popular retrofits. Morrissey Engineering, based in Omaha, works regularly with Lund properties and specializes in delivering high-performance solutions that achieve optimal energy efficiency for a tenant’s mechanical, electrical and technology needs. The company touts itself as being committed to “creating designs that achieve a balance between aesthetics and functionality to create the best environments for people to live and work.” A sign of this is their own 4940 building, which is the first in Nebraska to be awarded LEED® Platinum certification by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), the highest level of certification achievable. The same goes for Trane, a global leader in HVAC systems. Lund Company consults with the local dealer to help tenants upgrade and improve a property’s infrastructure and www.OmahaPublications.com