To Open Next Year : Bixby Office Park Will Be Linked to 3 Airports
Looking out your window at a busy freeway can be a pleasant occupation. Not if the window is in your living room--only when it’s in your office and there are a lot of cars bustling about on the freeway bringing you business.
The Bixby Office Park, under construction in Seal Beach and scheduled for opening about this time next year, fills the prescription. It is adjacent to the north side of the San Diego (405) Freeway and adjacent to the western side of Seal Beach Boulevard.
That location gives it direct, fast freeway access to three airports--Long Beach, John Wayne (Orange County) and Los Angeles International--and the business and financial capabilities of Long Beach, as well as its convention, exhibition and conference facilities.
The 18-acre complex will consist of three buildings, each four stories high, totaling 270,000 square feet of space, mostly for offices but with places for a financial institution, a family restaurant and a dinner house. It will be surrounded by surface parking for more than 1,000 cars.
Connected by Atriums
When it is completed, the Bixby Ranch Co. will have a fully modern commercial complex that will be valued--land, buildings, tenant improvements, landscaping--at about $45 million.
Two greenhouse-atriums, two and three stories in height and each about 5,000 square feet in floor area, will connect the three buildings, leading project designer Ken Lewis to comment that they will provide unusual tenant amenities and to add:
“The project is more than a building, it is a cluster of buildings that take full advantage of their unique arrangement to provide tenants, employees and visitors a variety of spatial and environmental experiences.”
Lewis is on the staff of Albert C. Martin & Associates, project architect and site master planner. The general contractor is C. L. Peck Contractors, the landscape architect is Katzmaier Newell Kehr, Corona del Mar, and interior design is by Reel Grobman & Associates, Santa Ana.
Imported Granite
Wells Fargo Realty Finance, Santa Monica, arranged a permanent loan commitment for $32.4 million from Teachers Insurance & Annuity Assn., New York. The exclusive leasing agent is Coldwell Banker Commercial Real Estate Services, Newport Beach.
The building exteriors will be clad between windows in Napoleon red granite and mahogany granite from Finland and Sweden. Interior features include high, coffered lobby ceilings, three elevators in each building, wool-fabric walls, cherry-wood doors and floor-to-ceiling tile in lavatories.
“We have built a great deal of flexibility into the buildings to accommodate future technology,” said Ronald A. Bradshaw, Bixby Land Co. senior vice president. “Installations such as a chilled water loop for computer systems are representative of the tenant-sensitive features that are being incorporated.”
Other tenant-kindly features include a security-card access system, computerized building monitor and a compatible mechanical system that will allow tenants to use air conditioning and lights on weekends.
Century-Old Holding
The site of the new complex is called the Old Ranch and has been held by the Bixby Land Co. for more than a century. The current office park, Bradshaw said, is the “first major office development in Seal Beach and, as such, reflects great sensitivity to shared concerns about height, traffic, safety and open space.
“Following a major effort by (the Bixby and Martin firms), the previously industrially zoned property was approved by the city of Seal Beach for luxury office use via a specific plan.
“Several things are integral to this project” to mitigate environmental and traffic concerns of Seal Beach officials,” Bradshaw continued. “They include minimum heights for four-story, Class A office buildings; low site coverage, buffer areas between the park and adjacent residential areas and the creation of a new 7th Street” that will bisect the park and relieve pressure on Seal Beach Boulevard.
“Responding to Southern California’s dramatic growth,” he concluded, “the company has broadened its capabilities to include land planning, development, financing, construction and management of a diverse portfolio of projects.
“Bixby Office Park at Old Ranch represents a new generation of our involvement in this dynamic market.”
