Retail Marketplace to Replace Unsuccessful Restaurant Site
After watching three successive restaurants--Bobby McGee’s, Jake’s and A.J. Spurs--go out of business while occupying an 11,600-square-foot building at the Oxnard Financial Plaza, commercial Realtors Jane and Bill Hagelis saw no reason to search for a fourth eatery to fill the space.
Instead, the husband and wife representatives of Capital Commercial/NAI approached the property owner, Channel Islands Properties, and the management firm, Sares-Regis Group, with a plan to eliminate the building altogether and replace it with an upscale two-building retail marketplace.
That 12,000-square-foot center, dubbed the Courtyard at the Financial Plaza, is scheduled to open in the spring. It will be designed largely to serve the 3,500 workers in the Financial Plaza tower, with tenants offering evening and weekend hours to draw the surrounding community.
“To lease the space to another single-user restaurant didn’t make sense,” Linda Hagelis said. “Most restaurants want to be on a freeway or in an entertainment center. We didn’t want to put a Band-Aid on it, so to speak, and put another restaurant in there.”
To design the Courtyard, Sares-Regis enlisted the help of architectural firm Lauterbach & Associates.
And to help create a design presentation that would be palatable to the Oxnard Planning Commission and potential retail tenants, Lauterbach sought the help of four men with little or no architectural background.
The unlikely quartet, adult education students enrolled in the animation department of Ventura’s Technology Development Center, spent six weeks creating a computer-animated 3-D video rendering of the completed Courtyard project. The work was created at no cost to the clients.
The three-minute color video--enhanced with animated figures walking through the complex, cars in the parking lot, water flowing in fountains and shadows around corners--was presented to the Planning Commission in late July. It was approved by a 7-0 vote.
Along with being a boost to a retail space that will be unique to western Ventura County, the video served as a valuable educational lesson and a foot in the door for students looking for new lines of work.
Run by the Ventura Unified School District, the technology center serves laid-off and otherwise displaced workers, as well as members of the general public looking to make career transitions or re-enter the work force.
The four students who worked on the Courtyard video--Brad Norton, Shane Steelman, Donald K. Bergthold and David Landen--were trained in computer and animation skills.
“Our department realized some time ago that we needed to have our students experience some real work relationships,” said Reeve Woolpert of the Technology Center’s animation department.
“In order to do that, we have allowed private industry to bring in their projects,” he said. “We collaborate using students’ skills and school resources to round out their training. I called around town looking for a firm interested in working with us. We went through a half-dozen firms before we got to Lauterbach.”
Woolpert said the Courtyard project provided educational opportunities in several areas.
“Typically, students follow a lesson plan by using tutorials and usually end up creating a Betty Crocker-style [project]--or students follow their own [vision],” he said. “But neither one of those is typical of what they’ll experience when they get into business. The students had to meet Lauterbach visions and Lauterbach had to meet the Sares-Regis visions.”
Steelman, for one, is impressed with the final project.
“I’ve watched the video 50 times and it still tickles me,” he said.
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Steelman received an associate of arts degree in architectural and civil drafting from Ventura College in 1989. He drifted away from the field, however, to become a psychiatric technician at Camarillo State Hospital and then a teacher at Ventura Unified School District
With the closure of the state mental facility, Steelman was provided with government funding to attend the technology development center. He used the opportunity to pursue his original professional goals.
“I saw this as an opportunity to set myself apart from the average Joe 2-D drafter,” he said.
“Once I saw what was possible [with a 3-D presentation], my dream job was to be with a company or forming a company that supplies this service,” he said. “Now that I’m out there looking for work, I’m not finding many architectural firms that are doing this in-house. I think they see the benefits, but they don’t want to be the first one to offer it, even if it may mean the client may not be as interested or the profit may not be as big” otherwise.
Use of a computer-animated video as an architectural tool is growing in popularity. But so far it hasn’t taken off in Ventura County, according to Mark Pettit, managing architect for Lauterbach & Associates’ Oxnard office.
“It’s being used very minimally here,” he said. “This, to the best of our knowledge, is the first fully animated video to be presented.”
Pettit said more animated 3-D projects should follow as the cost of the necessary equipment decreases. He said the benefits over 2-D drawings are easy to see.
“You are able to show depth perception and shadows and the nuances that come when you turn a corner,” he said. “It enables you to explore more details. You are able to show water moving, texture, colors. People are able to get the whole picture.”
Design changes that might have gone unnoticed until the building was complete can be made on the computer screen, he said.
“We can make color changes--in a couple of clicks you can go from blue to green to yellow,” he said. “With this project we were able to get a handle on what the roof was going to look like. People from the high-rise are going to be looking down on the roof, so we didn’t want any mechanical things up there.”
As the architects have concentrated on the Courtyard’s framework, the Hagelises have hunted for tenants to fill the place. No leases have been finalized, but Linda Hagelis said she has several upscale tenants close to signing.
“We are looking at somewhat national names or regional names,” she said.
“Most are going to be restaurants and food users, a couple of retail service-oriented users,” she said. “We do have four leases out right now and we’re in proposals with a few other tenants. We are targeting a coffeehouse, a Mexican restaurant, an Italian restaurant, a sandwich shop, a dry cleaner, a cellular phone company, a juice place, an ice cream place.”
In selling the site to businesses based outside the area, Hagelis said she has been promoting the number of employees just steps away at the Plaza towers as well as the growth of the surrounding area.
“We see a lot more retailers now coming to Ventura County,” she said. “There are some who say they want to be in Ventura, not Oxnard--Oxnard is sometimes misunderstood. It’s a matter of educating them. The Financial Plaza draws people from the West Valley to Santa Barbara.”
As far as the actual Bobby McGee’s, Jake’s and A.J. Spurs building, plans call for it to be sold to a private buyer and physically transported, in segments, to another location.
