Category: News

S&A was delighted to spend an afternoon volunteering on the farm at Food Connects.

Stevens & Associates is excited to welcome Martha Ratcliffe to their team as an assistant project manager.  Martha brings with her over 25 years of professional experience including over 10 years coordinating and managing projects.  The team looks forward to incorporating her research and analytical skills as well as her abilities to manage projects.  In addition to the renovation of the Brooks House in downtown Brattleboro, Vermont, Martha’s past experience includes multi-family housing projects, grants management, small commercial and light industrial projects.  She is currently assisting with a project for an industrial facility, an interactive educational & agricultural development and permitting for an historic façade renovation.

Stevens & Associates is excited to welcome their new team member, Sabrina Duk as Project Structural Engineer.  Sabrina values a holistic approach to design believing it is possible to create a sustainable and positive impact on the world through nurturing ideas that promote longevity and encourage responsible management of resources.
After receiving an Architectural Engineering degree from Pennsylvania State University, she began her career working for a boutique firm in Connecticut specializing in high-end residential, institutional, and timber frame projects throughout New England.  Sabrina moved onto a medium-sized engineering firm in Silicon Valley where she worked on mission critical facility and data center projects to expand her seismic design capabilities.  Recently returning from the San Francisco Bay area, she is currently completing her California engineering license.

Stevens & Associates Wins Award For The Historic Brooks House

BRATTLEBORO, VT, March  2015 — Stevens & Associates, P.C. received an award in this year’s Engineering Excellence Awards Competition by the American Council of Engineering Companies (ACEC) of Vermont. The Awards recognize outstanding examples of engineering excellence in projects recently completed within Vermont. The architectural design and engineering firm received the competition’s highest honors, the Grand Prize Award, for its work in renovating and rehabilitating the historic Brooks House located in downtown Brattleboro.   Stevens & Associates accepts this award and acknowledges Hardy Structural Engineering, LLC of Colchester, VT for their collaborative structural engineering effort on this project.

After a devastating fire in 2011, the Brooks House was in need of significant structural and architectural design.  Bob Stevens, founder and principal of Stevens & Associates partnered with several members of the community to develop a plan which would enhance the building and the economic growth of Brattleboro.  The building was reframed from the basement to the tower in order to address years of settlement and accommodate the new layout.  In addition, the project required a complex financing package of historic and new market tax credits, public and private loans, and private investments.

The $24 million renovation was completed in 2014.  This endeavor has rebuilt a cornerstone of downtown Brattleboro offering the community academic space for 2 colleges and a progressive K-8 independent school, 23 residential units, restaurants, retail shops, and a spacious atrium showcasing local artistic talent.  Stevens & Associates has won similar awards for projects in the past, including the Dot’s Restaurant in Wilmington, Brattleboro Transportation Center, the Wilder Building renovation, and the renovation of its own offices in the Cutler Block in downtown Brattleboro.

A few weeks ago, Chronicle reporter Ted Reinstein interviewed Bob Stevens to discuss The Brooks House for a segment called Main Streets and Back Roads: Brattleboro, Vermont.  This piece features the Chelsea Royal Diner, the Brattleboro Ski Jump, and provides a glimpse at what is currently happening at Rudyard Kipling’s old home. The segment airs tonight on WCVB at 7:30.

Here are the links if you missed it:

Brooks House:

1.) http://www.wcvb.com/chronicle/rescued-a-grande-dame/31486692

Duo Restaurant:

2.) http://www.wcvb.com/chronicle/brattleboro-native-surprised-to-be-back/31486934

Archer  Mayor:

3.) http://www.wcvb.com/chronicle/vermont-writers-muse/31486978

NY Taxi Cab in VT:

4.) http://www.wcvb.com/chronicle/anyone-call-a-cab-from-new-york/31487736

Stevens & Associates is delighted to announce the grand opening of the Brooks House, a historic restoration and adaptive reuse project that has been 3 years in the making.

The building, a cornerstone of downtown Brattleboro, burned in 2011. A team of investors, including Stevens & Associates founder Bob Stevens, came together to renovate the building to the tune of $24 million. The project included a gut rehab of the building, with apartments on the top floors, space for Community College of Vermont and Vermont Technical College, office space for Oak Meadow (a homeschooling curriculum company), and retail spaces on the ground level. The energy efficiency of the building was significantly upgraded with added insulation, new heating and lighting systems, and a new air-conditioning system. Historic features were preserved even as 21st-century features were added to the building.

In the end, Stevens & Associates and the investment group returned some of the grandeur to a building that was once the most impressive hotel on the East Coast. The lights are once again on, and people are once again flowing through the building.

What to do with an underused parking garage in Atlanta? If you’re a student at SCAD (the Savannah College of Art and Design), you turn it into a village of three, 135-square-foot microhomes called SCADpads, then have students, faculty, and guests live in them.

Like a lot of design school projects, the SCADpads are less about practicality and more about design concepts and exploring what’s possible. The pads themselves represent three regions – North America, Asia, and Europe – and are bright and full of funky details. There are plenty of high-end touches, including a Miehl induction cooktop, responsive windows, and smart-phone controlled systems.

There is, however, a kernel of practicality in the idea of a village of microhomes with shared outdoor spaces and a community garden. Take an underutilized space (a parking garage, a vacant lot, an abandoned warehouse) and put small but complete housing units in it. Use those to house students, singles, temporary workers, or the homeless. Bring life and vitality to otherwise dead urban zones, and potentially lower the crime rate (more vibrant streetscapes tend to experience less crime for the simple reason that there are more people around and watching). There’s also potential here for disaster relief housing using space (parking spaces) that isn’t otherwise being used.

To make this viable on a larger scale, however, a few things would probably have to change. There’s not a lot of room in the SCADpads for the occupants’ personalities to shine through. They have little control over the aesthetics of their spaces, and that could be a problem. The pads would need to be portable, too, if they were going to be used as temporary or disaster relief housing. Finally, as with most design school prototype projects, the costs of the pad would need to be brought down. (No more Miehle stovetops!)

As our designer Timberly Hund (who graduated from SCAD) noted, “It’s a great example of adaptive reuse and affordable living and tiny house living. It will be interesting to see how students use the outdoor space, but I imagine it will become a playground!”

We do a lot of adaptive reuse projects here at Stevens & Associates, but most of them involve renovations to historic buildings. This was a good reminder that eventually our modern infrastructure (parking garages) will need the adaptive reuse treatment as well, and will present an opportunity to create vibrant downtown microvillages with plenty of chances for community creation.