From the Register-Guard, April 14, 2009
Editor’s Note: When we began the WaterShed project, the idea of building green and looking at it with a longer-term investment philosophy received their share of ridicule. At the time, commitment to green building was considered by some to be a passing fad. We’re proud to have been ahead of the curve; it was worth taking the teasing.
Wanted: Apartment tenants willing to live extra environmentally conscious, who can pay three to four times the typical rent and who don't mind defrosting a back-to-the-future refrigerator by hand.
That's the score at Jeff and Victoria Wilson-Charles' new three-story stainless steel and stucco project now ready for rent - at upward of $2,000 per month - on the south bank of the Willamette River near the Ferry Street Bridge.
The "WaterShed" is a quirky project, developed by a philosophy major turned developer and built by an English major turned general contractor. It is avant-garde in its style of artistic living quarters, environmental systems and institution-free financing, and Eugene hasn't seen anything like it yet.
The building was forged in the creative tensions between art and environmental engineering.
Designer William Roach, for example, created a roof line with multidirectional peaks - it's a striking style but it left only enough south-facing roof for a 4.5 kilowatt solar array, which is only enough to light the building's exterior.
Engineering considerations, on the other hand, led to walls built of a pumice-textured material called autoclaved aerated concrete, which insulates best if left in block form. So interior designers had to work with the exposed plumbing and electrical conduit aesthetic.
The project - with five apartments and two ground floor commercial spaces - broke "green" barriers. Two three-story tanks hold 16,000 gallons of rain collected from the roofs as part of the first-ever commercial rainwater toilet-flushing system in Eugene. Heat comes from pipes drilled 300 feet into Earth's crust.
Eighty percent of the wood in the project came via a logger who does salvage work on U.S. Forest Service land. He removes trees deemed damaged or dangerous. The Douglas fir and incense cedar he cut form the ceiling beams, cabinetry, windows and doors in the project.
"That was pretty daring," said Jesse Elliott, the project general contractor. "(Wilson-Charles) had to take a pretty big leap of faith to have all the windows, doors and cabinets - all that stuff - made custom from wood milled by a one-man show up the McKenzie."
The project employed two dozen local artisans who rendered work in metal, glass and wood - including Elliott, who welded stair rails and light fixtures out of rebar left over from the poured concrete floors.
"Playing with patterns is definitely something we all had fun with on that project," Elliott said. "Jeff and Victoria are so open to ideas. We could show them something, and they'd say, 'all right.'?"
When it came to appliances, Wilson-Charles combed the globe for the nth degree of green technology, including dual flush toilets from Australia, energy-sparing washers from Sweden and the world's first wholly recyclable refrigerator from Denmark (without an energy-wasting, self-defrost feature).
Wilson-Charles and the companies building the WaterShed approached construction in the same way the slow food movement approaches dining - rejecting fast, mass, industrial processes. They spent five years on predevelopment work. Actual construction took 20 months - and although the project got "finaled," or the green light for occupancy was given in early December, the developer has yet to advertise.
Construction was an organic process, Elliott said, with the developer making decisions about design, materials and budget as the issues arose. "You have to guide the project as you go along rather than knowing what the final budget number is going to be at the end," Elliott said.
Sometimes construction paused while Wilson-Charles, the philosophy major, mulled over a decision.
"There was a little lull in summer 2007 when a lot of decisions could have been made, but Jeff was just holding on because he wasn't ready to make some of those decisions and he had a lot of family plans, and he really prioritizes family," Elliott said.
If a banker was financing the project, the pace of the work and the cost of the project might have given that banker an ulcer. Wilson-Charles plowed $4 million into the building, and the recent tax appraisal pegged its value at $567,000.
But Wilson-Charles financed the project himself, and he measures it against his own metric. For instance, he paid for a stainless steel roof that will last 150 years. "He's looking at the big picture, and this is his kids' inheritance," Elliott said. "There's a different business plan; there's no doubt about it."
In 2006, two years before the stock market lost half its value, Wilson-Charles said he had a distrust in stocks. He said he preferred putting his money into a building. "I have this stairwell piece of wood and not a theoretical piece of paper," he said, grasping the hand rail in the highest loft in the new building. "It's something I can hold that's real, and that's more comfortable. That's just the way I am."
Normally, developers face high carrying costs for every month a new project stands without tenants. Chief among those costs is the interest paid on construction loans from a bank - one reason developers are eager to move in renters the day the building is done.
Wilson-Charles loses money he might have gained from tenants, but he doesn't have to pay a bank.
So, though the building was "finaled" in December, by April he still hasn't begun renting out its units. He expects to mail a letter soon to about 75 people who've expressed an interest. "Maybe carrying costs would have been a good thing because I'd have more anxiety," Wilson-Charles said.
Part of the problem is the self-described agony he felt about setting the rents, which landed at $2,200 to $3,000, depending on the unit.
That's more than Eugene's swankiest rental digs, more than Crescent Village, Kentfield on Coburg Road, the penthouses at High Street Terrace or the top-of-the-line Broadway Place units. "Those are the highest rents in the city," Wilson-Charles said. "Coming from a regular background, that's sort of embarrassing."
Elliott said: "His goal wasn't to make it expensive. That wasn't the idea. That actually causes some angst for him."
The tenants who move into WaterShed will have views of the DeFazio foot bridge, the Willamette River, Skinner Butte and the motorcycle officer who persistently clocks drivers northbound on the Ferry Street Bridge.
They'll move through rooms with artwork and architectural angles to please the eye. They'll rest on terraces with rustling bamboo and dine in a courtyard. They'll breathe in incense cedar-scented rooms.
But they'll have to be people who are downscaling - or displaying - their possessions because, while the units have space and light, they have less in the way of enclosed closet space. They'll have to be those who don't mind energy miser lighting in the bathroom. "How much light do you really need to brush your teeth?" Wilson-Charles said, though he concedes that his mother needs stadium-style lighting to put on her make-up.
And the new tenants have got to like the exposed infrastructure.
"This is what my Mom hates," Wilson-Charles said, indicating a black pipe angling down one wall." That dirty shower water running right through your entry way."
"You have to have your head in a certain place to rent a place like this," he said.
The building will appeal to people from San Francisco, Seattle or New York, Elliott said, "people who are downsizing their city but not necessarily wanting to downsize their sense of style and lifestyle."
The project will attract people willing to walk their environmental talk - and also pay top dollar, said John Brown, a broker with Evans Elder and Brown. "There's still youngsters that will pay that. Trust me: thirtysomethings, the young engineer, the architect."
