Blu Dot's Portland store (Jeremy Bittermann)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
A few weeks ago, I visited the new Blu Dot furnishings store as part of its grand opening. Or perhaps I should say I visited the new Blu Dot store in the circa-1921 Kerr Building. But only in being attracted by the store and its interior design did I then learn the building's name and its history, despite admiring it for many years.
The building and the store are right across the street from the better-known Wieden + Kennedy Building at NW 13th and Everett; it's always been the building you see when exiting W+K itself or Bluehour restaurant, on the building's west side.
The Kerr Building is a handsome brick warehouse that's part of the broader 13th Avenue Historic District: the succession of former warehouse and industrial buildings that includes gems like the Chown Pella Lofts (1915) near 13th & Glisan, the Fisk Tire Company Building (1923) near 12th & Flanders, and the Armour Building (1910) at 13th & Flanders. After the 1905 Lewis & Clark exposition, this one-time residential area quickly became dotted with warehouses and industrial buildings.
Kerr Building, Armour Building, Chown Pella Lofts (Brian Libby)
As for Blu Dot, it's the first brick-and-mortar retail outlet in Oregon for this Minneapolis-based furnishings brand, which was co-founded in 1997 by John Christakos and Maurice Blanks (with Charlie Lazor) and has become one of America's most admired contemporary furniture brands. In 2018, for example, Blu Dot received a National Design Award from the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. The two were on hand for a tour of the store with Ben Waechter, whose firm, Waechter Architecture, designed the store.
Locating in the Pearl District was a no-brainer, Christakos explained, because the neighborhood is a bit of a furniture-store hot spot. "We like to be next door to our competitors," he said. "You buy furniture infrequently, and when you do, it’s nice to park once and be able to hit four or five spots in a row. We don’t want to be the one store that’s across town from that sort of controlled zone. This space was exactly the right size, good architecture. It was not in the best shape when we took it over, but perfect location, good size, good space."
Blu Dot founders Maurice Blanks and John Christakos (Cooper Hewitt/Smithsonian)
The portion of the building occupied by Blu Dot, essentially a ground-floor space but raised a bit with a loading dock, had previously been partitioned as offices. But much of that had to go. The intent was to uncover this heavy timber-framed building's bones.
"When we all visited, and really probably why we gravitated toward the spaces, was just the beauty of the heavy timber structure, the beauty of the grid, the fact that it’s on the corner so you have daylight from two sides," Ben Waechter explained.
"After we demo’d it, it was like, ‘Wow, that’s really cool. How do we kind of keep that?’" Christakos added.
Waechter has a particular gift for bringing clarity to both interior and exterior spaces. On facades, he uses a minimum of trim to make even simple inexpensive materials look elegant. Indoors, there is often a sense of calm you get from how a whole room, from its floors to the walls to the ceiling, can be made to feel like one container. Here in this old former 1920s warehouse, he recognized that the timber structure was worth calling attention too, but even after you took down the walls, there was still a lot of clutter, including a mezzanine that obstructed most of the double-height volume, a chunk taken up by the elevator and tenant entrance on Everett, and a bunch of mechanical equipment.
Blu Dot's Portland store (Jeremy Bittermann)
"How can we do a single gesture that incorporates and makes sense of those things that are impeding the beauty of the space in a clear way? Essentially it was making a ribbon around the space," Waechter explained. And sure enough, the signature move of the whole store design is really this curvy partitioning that forms both a kind of curtaining on the mezzanine (overall reduced in size) that hides a lot of that clutter, and also forms portions of the walls.
"You guys really solved a lot of problems with this," Blu Dot co-founder Maurice Blanks told Waechter during our tour. "It looks pretty straightforward, but we wanted it to be clearly separate from the heavy timber building, so the details of it had to be just right."
Both Waechter and the founders used the word "intervention" numerous times as we talked about this curvy wall and mezzanine form, as if aware that it's the first thing one's eye is drawn to as you enter the store. It brings to mind a balance perhaps any retailer is looking for: eye-catching design, but not too eye-catching. "This is a larger intervention for us than most of our stores," Christakos said. "The risk is that it becomes about the architecture and not the furniture. That didn’t happen here. I think it still ends up being a nice, quiet, interesting background. You notice it. It really elevates our stuff. But it’s not foreground."
Blu Dot's Portland store (Jeremy Bittermann)
Indeed, the gentle curve of Waechter's wall and mezzanine-screening surface becomes the sort of unspooling ribbon that leads one through the store, sometimes peeling back partially to reveal a carved-out furniture display on a platform or at the bank of windows. It looks a little bit like a stretched accordion, as if the whole thing could conceivably expand and retract. Even so, it does not compete with the furniture per se. The furniture is the only thing that isn't white. The floors and walls of the original building match the ribbon-screening, so the sofas and chairs and beds and tables provide the pops of color and texture. They also join with the ribbon as curvy alternatives to the rectilinear architectural container.
"We could have wrapped the outside with straight lines," Waechter explains, "but somehow visually and spatially it wouldn’t be a nice compliment to the rectilinear-ness of the grid."
As I left the Blu Dot store, however, it nagged at me that I didn't know this building's backstory. Luckily, though, the answer was easy to find because the Kerr Building is part of that aforementioned 13th Avenue Historic District, as bequeathed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. That meant the application can be found online, via the National Park Service, which administers the National Trust program.
This quarter-block site was purchased in 1909 by Alexander Kerr, who co-owned with his the Wadhams and Kerr Bros wholesale grocery company. Under the Monopole and Palace Car labels, Wadhams and Kerr Bros, packaged fruits, vegetables, fish, oysters, jellies, jams, peanut butter, olives, pickles, coffees, teas, spices, extracts, baking powder and other items, much of it in self-sealing mason jars that Kerr had patented. This became part of Kerr's other business located in the building: the Kerr Glass Jar Manufacturing Company (which has been bought and sold many times but survives today as part of the Dublin, Ireland-based Ardagh Group). They also all but invented the practice of shipping fruit juices in concentrate. Alexander Kerr also became a valued local philanthropist, founding the Albertina Kerr Nursery for orphaned children, which today is still in operation as the Albertina Kerr Center (which now serves children and adults with developmental disabilities).
Kerr Building (Brian Libby)
However, the Kerr companies were not the only tenants, even at the beginning. One original tenant, for instance, was the Edison Phonograph Company, which occupied the first two floors (with Kerr above). The building was also an early location for the Sherwin-Williams Company. Developer Homer Williams and his company, Williams & Dame, also had their offices here.
The building was designed by the firm of Strong and MacNaughton, but that's somewhat misleading because it actually wasn't an architecture firm but rather engaged in asset management. Ernest Boyd MacNaughton (1880-1960) was trained as an architect and practiced locally many years after emigrating from Boston. From 1907-1910, he partnered with Ellis Lawrence, who went on to become one of Oregon's most esteemed early 20th century architects and founded the University of Oregon's School of Architecture and Allied Arts. But by the time MacNaughton's firm took on this Kerr Building commission, he was only keeping his toe in architecture while Strong and MacNaughton rose as a trust company. Within eight years of the Kerr Building's opening, MacNaughton had become a trustee of First National Bank and in 1932 its president. From 1948-52 he also served as president of Reed College and from 1947-50 was president of the Oregonian Publishing Company.
The building is (to paraphrase the National Register listing) clad in a white-colored brick laid in a stretcher bond and is divided vertically into three sections: the ground level, three upper floors capped with a parapet wall, molding and flat roof. The north and east-facing elevations are divided into six equal bays divided by brick piers. The upper story windows are groups of three double-hung, wood decorative concrete molding at the third-story level.
Next year, the Kerr Building will be celebrating its centennial. Though the Pearl District has gentrified from its days as an industrial district, in some ways perhaps stories like this one represent buildings coming full-circle. Blu Dot furniture is not cheap, but perhaps not quite as expensive as some high-end furniture brands it competes with. Regardless, it's just another commodity being sold here, and in that way not wildly different from phonographs or mason jars or paint, all of which have been associated with Kerr Building owners and tenants. And the architecture is able to endure for generations because it's well-built and flexible, and the combination of brick cladding and large windows is timeless.
Blu Dot's Portland store (Jeremy Bittermann)
By comparison, once you build cheaply, it's hard to go back and fix that. Look at the city's most famous work of architecture, the Portland Building, which is reopening this month after construction costs of over $100 million. That's for a building originally completed in 1984. The mayor at the time, Frank Ivancie, had campaigned on fiscal restraint and insisted that the Portland Building be built for far less per square foot than a conventional office building. Architect Michael Graves was eager enough to win the design competition that his firm was the only one of three competitors to propose a building for the proposed budget, but in order to do so, the designers and builders had to resort to compromise after compromise, which in turn caused the building to leak repeatedly over the decades, no matter how many times its painted-concrete facade was patched up. Only by completely re-cladding the whole building with an aluminum-covered rain screen system could the problem be solved once and for all.
By the time the Portland Building opened, the Kerr Building was already 63 years old: older than the Portland Building is now. I'm not saying it's better than the Portland Building. In terms of ambition and intent, they couldn't have been more different. One was utilitarian and industrial, the other a government office building packaged as a statement about architecture itself. But there is a kind of tortoise-and-hare theme that seems to emerge when you look at them in tandem.
Ultimately, I'm glad we have both: the fabric building and the attention-seeking confection. Maybe, then, what makes Waechter Architecture's Blu Dot store compelling, at least for me, is that in that curvy accordion partitioning — however functional it may be — the design introduces just a bit of confection to that humble, respectable host.
Advertisements
Happened to walk past the Portland Building yesterday. The renovation really looks excellent. Also noticed renovation of the "short" building in the Wells Fargo Bank complex. Interesting adaptation of a difficult structure, it appears.
Posted by: Fred Leeson | March 10, 2020 at 02:47 PM