Ten years ago, Charlestown began a facility-wide renovation to better reposition the Catonsville, Md.-based CCRC in the shifting senior living marketplace. “We’re trying to get ready for the next generation of what residents will be looking for in our types of environments,” says Vinson Bankoski, associate executive director of Charlestown (Catonsville, Md.).
Those efforts involved making apartments and public spaces more conducive to wireless and high-speed Internet and upgrading the small fitness facility to nearly 8,000 square feet with free weights, spinning rooms, and multiple pools. Another area where the community saw a need for change was its dining facilities, as residents sought healthier foods, more dining options, and casual settings for grabbing a bite to eat.
The six restaurants at Charlestown didn’t fit that bill, including its Terrace Room. In fact, the 5,933-square-foot space looked largely the same as it did nearly 30 years ago when founder John Erickson bought a former seminary college and opened the company’s first retirement community. “It had an L-shaped cafeteria line with the typical things you’d see in an institutional setting,” Bankoski says.
Craig Kimmel, a partner at RLPS Architects (Lancaster, Pa.), which collaborated on the project, says it felt a little bit like leftover space. “One of the challenges was that there was nothing unique about it,” he says.
The project team, including RLPS, Erickson Living, and Charlestown Dining Services, set out to give the restaurant, renamed Terrace Café following the remodel, a stronger and more contemporary identity. In the process, they also wanted to expand the seating capacity, create more flexibility and flow in the kitchen, and ultimately put the focus on dining. “Before the renovation, the space and flow were poorly defined,” Kimmel says. “We were trying to create an area of eating versus an area of getting food.”
That transformation and the ability to increase the volume of the space without undertaking significant structural renovations helped the project win this year’s Remodel/Renovation Competition for resident amenities. Specifically, jurors lauded the project for the “creation of a new experience that looks like a fun dining option” and “telling a great story and connecting to the local context.”
Think local
The community’s proximity to Baltimore and the architecture of local landmarks such as Inner Harbor and Camden Yards inspired the restaurant’s new industrial, warehouse-type aesthetic, which includes brick walls, arch-top windows, steel frames, and exposed ductwork.
To account for acoustics and sound reverberation, a perforated metal deck with a high acoustical rating was used on the ceiling, while the flooring includes a mix of carpeting (for sound absorption in the seating areas) and tile (for easy cleanup in the food service areas).
Like many renovations, there were space constraints to overcome. At Charlestown, many of those challenges were associated with being landlocked between existing retail services and resident apartments.
The team chose to bump out onto an existing patio area to make room for a new dining room with an A-frame roof and 17-foot ceiling. Inside, near the entrance, a small video library and a few retail spaces were relocated to free up approximately 200 square feet of space. Both additions helped the restaurant nearly double capacity to 96 seats.
Kimmel says a multifaceted lighting strategy creates layers of lighting in the dining area, including halogen lights over banquettes and decorative pendants above the bar. LED uplights project onto the roof trusses to illuminate the tall ceiling and create a contrast with the darker materials and colors below. “It makes it feel bigger and lighter,” he says. “This space is getting used quite often in the evening, so we didn’t want that to be a dark ceiling.”
To improve traffic, the food service area was moved to the back of the 7000-square-foot restaurant, allowing room for a new pub area and banquet-style seating. The triangular-shaped space has food stations, rather than the former cafeteria-style service line, to help keep customers moving, while exhibition dining elements, including a brick hearth oven, were brought out into the public space to encourage interaction between residents and the chef.
Food for thought
The Terrace Café is one of two restaurants that has undergone updates as part of Charlestown’s repositioning efforts. Renovations to the other four are expected to start in early 2015.
After the Terrace Café opened last fall, the staff regrouped in January 2014 to see what it had learned after a few months in operation. While feedback was overwhelmingly positive from residents and the staff, there was one element from the old space that was missed: tray rails.
Bankoski says the project team intentionally focused on eliminating elements that echoed the former cafeteria feeling, so those stainless-steel tray rails had been replaced with stone countertops.
Now that residents have expressed a preference for rails to rest their trays, Charlestown is going back and adding shelf extensions in some areas, such as the hearth oven, deli, and grill, with plans to add more near the beverage station. A new island is also being constructed in the carryout section so residents have a place to pack up meals.
“One of the learning pieces that we walked away with is that as you’re thinking about your vision, you can’t lose sight of how people are actually going to use the site,” he says.
Anne DiNardo is senior editor of Environments for Aging. She can be reached at [email protected].
For more on the Environments for Aging Remodel/Renovation Competition finalists, read “The Art Of LTC Renovations.”
Project Source List
Owner: Charlestown Community, Inc.
Architecture: RLPS Architects LLP
Interior design: RLPS Architects LLP
Contracting: Harkins Builders, Inc.
Engineering: Reese Engineering Inc.
Construction: Harkins Builders, Inc.
