Saving a Historic Landmark
In downtown San Diego, designers and engineers came together with a motivated developer to turn a deteriorating Romanesque office building into the city’s hippest new hotel.
The 121-year-old Granger Building occupies a storied place in the history of downtown San Diego. Originally home to one of the city’s most prominent banks, the stately five-story building played many roles over the years, including lodging animals on their way to the new San Diego Zoo in 1917.
By 2018, the building had fallen into disrepair. The retail floor housed a check-cashing store, tattoo studio and massage parlor, and most of the offices were empty when family company Oram Holdings purchased the building with the idea of developing a boutique hotel.
“We saw a void, and we wanted to come in with what we believe is the future and what San Diego needs,” says Kevin Mansour, who cofounded Oram with his brother, Alvin.
For the next five years, Oram and LPA’s integrated design team worked to turn the aging steel-frame building into Oram’s vision, navigating the labyrinth of historic reviews, century-old structural issues and fast-changing market conditions. The collaboration delivered a 96-room boutique hotel, the Granger Hotel Gaslamp Quarter, that preserves and highlights the building’s historic character and creates a new landmark for an evolving downtown neighborhood.
From the start of the process, the focus was on developing an economically feasible approach to the adaptive reuse, which included turning the office floor plans into comfortable hotel rooms. Previous plans called for tearing out the walls and rebuilding the interior structural system, which would have cost millions more than the owner’s budget.
“We needed to find minimally invasive strategies to mitigate cost and risk for the owners,” says LPA Director of Mixed-Use Matt Winter, who served five terms on San Diego’s Historic Resource Board. “And at the same time, we had to find a way to preserve a beautiful landmark building.”
MAKING IT WORK
Office buildings are often not suitable for adaptive reuse, but the Granger offered Oram several key advantages. Large windows, the L shape, favorable existing grid system and a convenient elevator location made it easier to divide up the spaces to create enough rooms to make the hotel’s finances work and give each room a view.
Many of the most distinctive features presented the biggest challenges. The original embossed tin ceilings were in good condition and would need to be preserved. The distinctive office doors and windows were 120 years old, with transoms, letter slots and single-pane glass lites, and would also need to be retrofitted for hotel standards.
Teams of engineers and designers analyzed every aspect of the building, looking for existing elements that could be saved, while meeting fire and safety codes. “Every time we opened up a wall or ceiling, we found something new and unexpected,” Winter says. “Many systems had been built on top of each other for decades and didn’t show up in any plans.”
The LPA team worked closely with the local regulatory authority to document existing systems. Using archival materials, fire-protection engineers were able to build out prescriptive wall and ceiling typologies with existing conditions that met existing building codes. The layout was developed to efficiently stack modern mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems.
The historic office doors presented one of the biggest challenges — the distinctive transoms and original glass lites were designed for offices and were not close to meeting current code, either for fire rating or sound requirements. Replacing them was not an option. Eventually a system of smoke seals and hardware retrofits was developed, a strategy allowed by the California Historic Building Code as an acceptable alternative to meet code compliance.
The resulting design hit the 96-room count that was essential for the hotel’s financial success and preserved the integrity of the pressed-brick interior, including the ultra-wide corridors and ceilings. The exterior windows and façade remained largely untouched, with an interior glazing panel added to mitigate street noise.
Kevin Mansour, cofounder Oram Holdings
A DOWNTOWN CATALYST
The project ultimately spent about two and a half years in design, permitting and historic review. At many points, progress appeared to be stalled as teams worked through issues and developed options that would meet the budget.
Oram owns and operates its developments; from the start the team took a long-term view to the building. “We preserved everything that we could,” Mansour says. “We also saved any of the pieces that we couldn’t use, just in case we needed them in the future.”
The interior design was developed by Oram Hotels’ in-house team and reflects the Granger’s fabled history. A lush, cozy atmosphere touches on the building’s different eras, including graphics reflecting its time housing zoo animals. The property comprises two restaurants, including The Parlor Room, a lobby lounge with handcrafted cocktails, designed to attract an audience of young creatives.
“Oram has done a wonderful job of creating a new destination for downtown and capturing the spirit of the building,” Winter says. “We were able to create an economically feasible project that transformed the building and created new value.”
The Granger is the first San Diego hotel selected into the Marriott Design Collection, and it was recently included in the Michelin Guide for San Diego. It has created a catalyst for development on a key corner on the northern edge of the city’s Gaslamp Quarter. For a redeveloping downtown struggling with many of the issues facing cities around the country, the project illustrated a creative approach to redeveloping and preserving a historic landmark, while bringing new energy and life to the neighborhood.
Historic adaptive reuse is never easy or simple, but the finished product wipes away all the pain and effort, Mansour says.
Kevin Mansour, cofounder Oram Holdings
