Luxury Housing in the Heart of La Mesa
Jefferson La Mesa
Jefferson La Mesa is a 4.77-acre luxury housing development located in the heart of the city of La Mesa. This contemporary garden-style community will add life to an old, abandoned lot that once housed an auto repair business. The multi-level apartments will offer live-work units and will be enhanced by a myriad of amenities:
Resort-style pool and spa
Poolside cabanas
Outdoor fire pits
Barbeque
Pet park with a grooming station
EASY ACCESS FOR RESIDENTS
The development is a short walk from the La Mesa Boulevard trolley station, nestled between El Cajon Boulevard and University Avenue along Baltimore Drive.
Within close proximity to the bustling La Mesa downtown village and a quick commute to downtown San Diego, home to multiple job and entertainment centers, this new development will bring a renewed spirit to this thriving community.
LISTENING TO THE COMMUNITY
We had the privilege of collaborating with a great team, working through challenges that projects bring to us to successfully resolve. This project has been in the pipeline for several years prior to breaking ground, giving us the time to thoughtfully consider how best to address the concerns of the local community.
Our process included having a number of meetings with the city and community. This part of the project is vital to hear what local businesses and residences request so team members can address and find solutions early in the project’s development.
CREATING A PLACE FOR THE COMMUNITY
During the course of these meetings a variety of concerns were raised, such as increased traffic noise and pedestrian safety. As Jefferson La Mesa is a project designed for residents of the local community, we addressed their concerns with a creative solution—a pedestrian-friendly thoroughfare along Baltimore Drive with charming planted parkways separating the vehicular traffic from the pedestrian pathway.
Additionally, bike lanes were added connecting to the north across El Cajon Blvd. Planted medians were designed to be incorporated within the project boundaries. This will create a visual buffer from automobiles and will minimize the environmental sound pollution.
A pocket park along Baltimore Drive featuring a live planted wall, seating areas to enjoy the outdoors, and bike racks to lock up your bike will provide a breathing space for pedestrian use.
Additionally, the plantings around Jefferson La Mesa create a lush contemporary garden aesthetic. Drought tolerant and native plantings are used to blend the perimeter of the site to its context. A layering of plant texture is created along the front of the building, combining fine leaf with broader leaf plants, wispy plants mixed with long-blooming plants, creating a dynamic visual experience. The pool area, located at the front of the building along Baltimore Drive, is accentuated by a grove of majestic Medjool Date Palms. Once inside the pool area, a lush blending of vertical plants with deep green hues help soften the building foundation, providing privacy while giving the experience of an urban oasis.
McCullough and the rest of the team prioritized the community’s wishes - to create a desirable, luxury housing development in the growing city of La Mesa.
THE TEAM
Client: JPI
Architect: ARK
Civil: Latitude 33
Client of Month:
Meridian Development
Poway Commons, San Diego
PROJECTS FOR THE COMMUNITY
Meridian Development, a San Diego-based land development and asset management firm, is McCullough’s Client of the Month for November. The company was established in 2014 on a “people-centric philosophy” that guides every step of their endeavors. Principal partners Guy Asaro, Todd Galarneau, Rey Ross, and Sean Cogswell started the company with a singular purpose:
“To create projects and communities that enhance the lives of people who live, work, and shop there.”
Meridian Development takes tremendous pride in aligning their business relationships with like-minded companies, who also value the responsibility to develop lasting, environmentally friendly communities their customers are happy to call home. Thankfully, McCullough’s approach and purpose for our projects are mirrored in Meridian’s values.
BRINGING TOGETHER DECADES of EXPERIENCE
Prior to starting Meridian Development, each of the owners held senior-level positions at Corky McMillin Companies. Meridian Development benefits from their diverse skills, unique expertise, and large portfolio of real estate experience.
Collectively, the team has played an active role in creating and implementing several major development projects across the nation, resulting in over a billion dollars in retail land sales. Today, Meridian Development is combining their resources to create a full-service land development firm that specializes in:
Initial site acquisition and finance
Complex land entitlements
Processing of environmental and government permits
Large-scale physical land development
Build-out construction
RELATIONSHIPS BUILT ON RESULTS
Meridian Development uses a relationship-oriented approach to create local communities for families to enjoy for years to come. In doing so, Meridian Development utilizes their most successful and outstanding business practices while partnering with forward-thinking companies that share the same innovative vision of our future. It is this type of synergy that propels and empowers Meridian Development to create meaningful living quarters for the community.
Presently, Meridian Development is developing Millenia, a 210-acre urban community in south San Diego County. It encompasses nearly eighty city blocks in a pedestrian-friendly grid system.
Millenia, a two-billion-dollar project, is estimated to be one of the largest construction sites in Southern California. A few of Meridian Development’s communities include Metro Row Homes at Millenia, Trio Garden Homes at Millenia and Evo Flats and Towns at Millenia.
MCCULLOUGH DESIGNS COMPLeMENT MERIDIAN PROJECTS
McCullough was delighted to be selected for the landscape design for their projects, Genesis and Pinnacle at Millenia. These two projects were a wonderful opportunity to be a part of this large-scale project and bring our vision to life.
Our most recent project with Meridian Development is Poway Commons, a nine-acre mixed-use community with a family-oriented and pedestrian-friendly community that will provide 141 multi-family residential units and 97 market-rate townhomes and flats.
Included in the plan is 44 affordable apartments created for seniors by Chelsea Investment Corporation and 2.2 acres that are to be allocated strictly for retail usage.
On-site amenities include the following:
Pathway along Rattlesnake Creek connecting Poway Road to a community park
Gathering space with a private barbeque and picnic area
Pocket park located in front of the Poway Library
“This is more than a new development. It’s a call to action to welcome a new diversity of residents who have been waiting to call Poway home.”
—Steve Vaus, mayor of Poway
To learn more about Meridian Development, visit their website > here.
Nicole Hensch
Marketing and Administrative Assistant
Great Design:
A Balance Between Humility and Courage
Ed Holakiewicz, AIA
Senior Principal,
Architects Mosher Drew
Some weeks ago, we posted an interview with Ed Holakiewicz of Architects Mosher Drew, a leading figure in San Diego’s architectural community. We discussed COVID, design for educational facilities, and his personal goals as an architect. Among the various topics, one of the ideas that came up in our discussion resonated with me:
What kind of research or observations has informed your design process for schools during COVID times?
We’re talking about an environment for learning, much farther reaching than merely COVID. With the Biophilic Design approach, sensory awareness is created with the use of color, textures and light, and healthy environments include improved natural daylighting and filtered airflow. This is a philosophical design concept process, creating healthy environments for people. Both San Diego High School and Mira Mesa High School have embraced an indoor and outdoor learning system that takes their students beyond the classroom experience and into a brand-new multi-environment, dynamic learning setting. —Ed Holakiewicz, AIA | Senior Principal
In thinking Ed’s response over these past weeks, I had some additional thoughts.
Designers can be reactionaries, creating makeshift solutions to problems as they arise.
Climate change? Throw some photovoltaic panels on the roof.
Airborne disease? Let’s put Plexiglas shields between people and stickers on the floor.
We often tend to look at these piecemeal solutions as I N N O V A T I O N, when in fact they are small adaptations that do not address the problems head on. For example, the carbon footprint produced by building a large structure out of concrete and gypsum cannot be offset by simply putting photovoltaic panels on the roof. The numbers just don’t add up. It’s the old Whopper-and-a-Diet-Coke thing.
There’s a similar issue with COVID. The Plexiglas and stickers are wonderfully helpful short-term solutions. However, as we look into the future, it makes sense to recognize that humans living in this new and densely urban world will have to contend with airborne diseases as long as we continue to live within reach of each other’s breath. Perhaps if we deal with the air itself, we can obviate the need for Plexiglas screens and six-foot stickers.
Designers can go beyond a reactionary mindset to a progressive one. Let’s take bioconstruction as an example of a design framework that addresses multiple problems at the same time by working against their root causes.
Bioconstruction is the practice of making buildings out of humble materials like hay, wood, and earth. With such unassuming materials, architects have been able to build buildings up to three stories in height that do not tax the environment to the same extent that typical buildings do. Whereas concrete releases carbon dioxide while it cures, these other materials hold embodied carbon in their composition, or in the case of earth construction, they do not involve carbon at all. Additionally, a principal tenet of bioconstruction is the use of passive means to reduce or eliminate the need to produce energy to make a building thermally comfortable and well lit. These buildings have thick walls that keep heat inside when it’s cold or keep it outside when it’s hot. These buildings use glazing in careful ways to promote daylighting and avoid solar heat gain in hot climates.
Bioconstruction also prioritizes the use of local materials to build with. Most strikingly, many bioconstruction projects use material collected, grown or quarried on the construction site itself, eschewing the standard practice of moving materials across vast distances in large trucks. In Bali, for example, the design firm IBUKU has built large homes up to three stories out of giant timber bamboo sourced nearby. In the Southwestern desert of the United States, architects like Rick Joy have been building homes out of earth dug from onsite. These buildings could be left alone for a century, and they would erode or decompose, leaving little trace on the planet of our species’ real estate market’s whims and crashes. Could you say the same about the stucco and concrete boxes that seem to sprout along every road we pave?
The designers who employ and promote bioconstruction are attacking several problems at once:
Carbon footprint of the construction industry
Energy used to make buildings comfortable and useful
Fuel needed to move materials to the site
Management of demolition waste
They have created a framework, a way of thinking about architecture that goes beyond minimizing our impact on the planet and seeks to eliminate it altogether. Sure, we can put solar panels on buildings, erect green walls, and try to source concrete mix from the closest processing plant, but these are baby steps. Bioconstruction proposes a viable way of taking an actual big step forward, a way of making buildings from the nature around us. This architectural mindset is both ancient and new at the same time, and the advent of robotic construction may enable it to finally compete for cost with conventional construction methods.
Kids inside classrooms with COVID floating in the air? We can make a big fuss about improving HVAC systems and filters. Or, as Ed Holakiewicz of Architects Mosher Drew says, “we can take a biophilic approach to the problem and question whether kids should even be sitting inside all day."
Biophilic design is another framework, distinct from Bioconstruction, based on the premise that humans need sensory and physical connection to nature in order to be healthy and happy. Instead of adding widgets to an indoor classroom to stem the spread of disease, biophilic proposes a simpler solution: teach the kids outside, where the breeze can blow. No room outside to teach? Bring the outside in, let the breeze blow in. Biophilic architecture tends to make use of natural light and ventilation, ample amounts of greenery, as well as views and proximity to nature. By following this suite of design principles that engage several problems at once, architects can tackle the challenge of an airborne illness as well as provide an environment that is well-lit and comfortable. In order to combat COVID, architects could specify fancy filters to be installed in the HVAC system. To reconcile the need for ample lighting while minimizing energy use, the latest LEDs could be specified. To foment a connection with nature, architects could specify giant posters of landscapes to be pasted to the walls. Instead, they could just design classrooms that are indoor/outdoor spaces and solve all three problems with one smart move.
Benjamin Arcia, M.U.D., ASLA
Senior Associate,
McCullough Landscape Architecture, Inc.
What I appreciate about Ed Holakiewicz’s design mentality is that it demonstrates how there are two different flavors of pragmatism, the kind which puts the Band-Aid on a scraped knee, and the kind that builds a handrail so you don’t fall in the first place.
We share a similar mentality at McCullough. Whether a project involves urban design, landscape design or land planning, we are versed in the varying frameworks of thought which informs smart decision-making in each realm of the built environment. Our staff is passionate about design movements such as Permaculture, Restoration Agriculture, New Urbanism, Landscape Urbanism and Biophilic Design. We understand that we stand on the shoulders of giants, people who came before us who have tested and proven design methodologies throughout decades, and in the case of New Urbanism, centuries. Being smart enough to borrow existing good ideas from others takes humility; being ambitious enough to push those ideas into new frontiers takes courage and conviction. We find that great design lies in the balance between humility and courage.
Benjamin Arcia, M.U.D., ASLA
Senior Associate