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Oct 05, 2023

From A.A. Adams to Urban Outfitters

Before Urban Outfitters clothes any customers, it outfits its stores. In

Before Urban Outfitters clothes any customers, it outfits its stores.

In downtown Norfolk, it first had to undress the interior of 271 Granby St. The retailer wanted everything exposed: brick, beams, original wood.

In late February, a demolition crew tore into walls, floors and staircases. Jonathan Provost started to rip off the old plaster covering the brick.

"Then, they saw the walls as they were and said, ‘Stop!’ " he recalled.

Urban Outfitters’ store designers loved the look of the old plaster, which is still clinging to the wall – a mashup of a faded floral mural overlaid by a newer geometric print. For local contractors such as Provost, that was one of the first signs that this job and this retailer veered far from the ordinary.

This summer, Urban Outfitters plans to open its first Hampton Roads store, a palace of industrial, antique and avant-garde fixtures. It has taken months of painstaking work and attention to detail to capture the unique Urban milieu.

"It's not just about selling a coat or a pair of pants," said Bobby Wright, managing partner in

the company that owns the building. "It's about selling an experience."

Unlike most fashion chains, Urban Outfitters eschews shopping malls and clean, cookie-cutter boxes in favor of aging, often historic buildings in urban hubs.

The elements might seem mismatched and unfinished in an Urban store, but it's all by design. Each reflects the eclecticism and irreverence that make the retailer popular – and not just for the trendy clothing and accessories that it sells.

Take the 16-foot floor-to-ceiling orange steel beams at the Norfolk location. Before Urban came in, they were hidden behind flame-retardant walls. Workers also uncovered the original wood floor joists.

"I took off two layers of drywall, a hat channel and a tin ceiling," said Provost, who owns a construction company with his father.

In downtown Norfolk, the retailer's real estate team visited other properties before deciding on the A.A. Adams building, which faces the MacArthur Center mall. Built in 1910 as part of the block-long Fentress Building, the Urban site housed a Singer Sewing shop, variety store and most recently the Time Lounge nightclub, according to William Inge, who works in the Norfolk Public Library's Sargeant Memorial Collection.

"They assessed all the historic and architectural elements of that building, and they wanted to preserve it, as well as enhance it," Wright said.

Making a retail space look old and new at the same time doesn't come cheap. Though he wouldn't give the price in this case, Wright said retrofitting an existing structure, particularly an older one, always costs more than building from scratch.

Contractors have to upgrade features to comply with city codes and make modern materials fit with their aged counterparts. They have no prototype to follow from store to store, because each Urban Outfitters is different. And then there's the meticulous mandates of their employer.

Throughout the retailer's Norfolk space, large books of construction plans, about 80 pages each, lay on tables, outlining every detail of the store. The superintendent for Murray Costello Construction Inc., the contractor in charge of the project, takes photographs of each piece of work completed daily and emails them to the Urban Outfitters designers, who blow them up and study them intently.

On a job in Baltimore, one contractor said, the Urban team could tell from such photos that workers hadn't installed the right galvanized metal ducts and demanded that they tear them out and replace them.

Murray Costello's employees said they couldn't answer questions for The Virginian-Pilot, citing Urban Outfitters’ policy. Urban Outfitters Inc. officials didn't respond to messages left at their headquarters in Philadelphia.

So The Pilot relied on Provost, who has refurbished many of Wright's properties, and other local contractors to piece together a picture of Urban Outfitters’ approach to store development. Provost said other downtown Norfolk sites could benefit from a champion that takes similar care with construction.

"It's securing a tenant that has the money to bring the beauty back to that building," he said.

Here are some of the key elements that customers will see when they walk into the Urban Outfitters store:

THE FLOORS

The first step inside is a revelation. Daylight streams in – through 11-foot-tall front windows and slats left open between the floor joists overhead.

Following the retailer's direction, Provost sliced across the front corners of the second and third floors, pulling up the floorboards to create rustic, triangular skylights that allow illumination from both upper levels. "For visual effect," he explained, walking through the construction site in early May.

On the mezzanine level toward the back wall, much of the floor needed replacing. Workers laid smooth planks of new, light-colored oak.

Then they threw dirt all over it.

"They were told to make it look antique-y," Provost said.

By the time the store opens, if all goes as planned, the layer of brown soil and crushed concrete will have scratched and scuffed the new section enough to make it resemble the decades-worn, darkened oak floors elsewhere in the building.

A cartoonish crime-scene figure, the outline of a corpse, decorates the old oak floor of the second level. The owners of Relative Theory Records, which occupied the floor above Time Lounge from 2003 to 2007, painted it there.

Orders from Urban Outfitters: Leave it.

THE CONDUIT

It looks like the organ pipes in a giant church. Or, one of the contractors suggested, a computer circuit board.

Joe Donahue, the foreman for Fee's Electrical Service Inc. in Portsmouth, was instructed to design an interesting configuration for the conduit, through which cables for electricity, security and audio all run. He envisioned a waterfall. "That's what it looks like to me."

However it appears, it's among the primary focal points of the Urban Outfitters store.

"The challenge with it is trying to read their minds, in a sense, trying to get what they’re trying to do," Donahue said.

About 40 rows of the shiny steel tubes run parallel up pockmarked brick and plaster and disappear into the ceiling. On the bottom, they split in half, with each side turning out at 90-degree angles.

"They want this to be artwork," Donahue said.

And functional. The lights, computers, checkout systems all depend on the 15,000 feet of 3/4-inch conduit that he estimated runs through the building.

Workers spent weeks bending the tubes to get the curves exactly the way Urban Outfitters directed. Remnants of imperfectly turned pipe lay in piles of twisted metal on the floor of each level.

Tom Claunch, a subcontractor from Virginia Beach spent several weeks on high ladders or mechanical risers, carefully connecting conduit and electrical wires across the ceiling. "Everything's got to be pristine," he said.

A discrepancy of more than a centimeter between couplings, the metal jackets and screws that tie the pipe sections together, meant starting the whole process over, Claunch said.

Claunch has completed larger jobs for supermarket chains, but no client has been as fastidious as Urban Outfitters, he said. Most of the work for other retailers ended up behind walls, not as visual elements.

For Urban, he said, "I’m trying to make it as pretty as I can."

THE WINDOWS

It's no easy feat to lift a window weighing 340 pounds up three stories when the space is too tight and too fragile for machinery. That was the challenge facing Lew Drake's crew of glaziers, who installed three stories of windows crowning the front of Urban Outfitters.

Only a narrow stairwell provides access to the third level, and there's no floor under the windows there. So, on the last day of May, nine men in groups of three raised the panes by hand from one level to the next, using scaffolding they’d fashioned.

Most installations are simpler, said Drake, the glazier foreman for Walker & Laberge Co. Inc., based in Norfolk. "It's been a challenge," he acknowledged, "but that's what we do."

His crew had to install Urban Outfitters’ windows from the inside, into steel frames built by the contractors. And the glaziers had to step over a large heating duct, running right under the windows, on the third level.

Earl Smaltz, wearing a harness attached to a rope and connected to a secure hook, balanced in the open window frame, with one foot on the brick sill and one outside the building. He's used to perils, he said, explaining that he had dangled 23 stories high to install the vertical glass panels of the downtown Wells Fargo Center for another Walker & Laberge project.

The Urban Outfitters job added another twist to the hazards. For the Norfolk store, Urban chose tempered safety glass. One chip could cause an entire pane to shatter into countless tiny pieces.

Most modern construction uses thermal units, "insulated glass," that provide a cushion of air to control temperature, Drake said. And most new buildings have aluminum window frames that protect from wind and water and allow installation from the outside, he said.

Urban Outfitters, as with much of its design, rejected the norm.

"It's high-dollar stuff," Drake said. "You hardly see that anymore because it is old-fashioned. But that's what they want."

THE STAIRCASE

In Time Lounge, which occupied the Urban Outfitters space until February, the stairs from the ground level shot straight up from the back of the building to the mezzanine, where they split into two smaller staircases on opposite sides, leading to the next level.

Urban Outfitters’ designers disliked those stairs and had contractors take them out.

They wanted a centerpiece, literally, for the store. Workers cut a 400-square-foot hole in the middle of the building between the mezzanine and the level above. Through it rises a wide, angled stairway.

"This is their look. This is their signature," Provost said.

It's the first thing most visitors will notice: a hulking metal sculpture, elegant and functional.

Heavy chicken wire fills the spaces between the stairs’ risers. The first step sits on a handcrafted wooden platform.

Well after the platform was in place, workers noticed a space on each side of that first step. It was a quarter of an inch – too much for Urban Outfitters.

The workers yanked out every piece of wood and replaced them until everything fit tight.

A couple of weeks ago, Wright said, he noticed two men in their 30s or 40s, dressed in polo shirts – not the look he associates with the typical Urban Outfitters customer. The retailer's sign over the door, now complete, still had a few letters missing at that time: the B, the N, a U and the I and E.

The men stopped at one of the windows, cupped their hands around their eyes and peered inside.

"Wow!" Wright overheard them say. "Look at the stairs. This store is going to be great."

Carolyn Shapiro, 757-446-2270, [email protected]

ABOUT URBAN OUTFITTERS

Headquarters: Philadelphia

Annual sales: $2.47 billion as of Jan. 31

Number of stores: 197 in the United States, Canada and Europe

Affiliated companies: Parent company Urban Outfitters Inc. also owns the Anthropologie clothing chain; Free People brand of clothing and stores; Leifsdottir line of clothing and accessories; Terrain home garden shop; and bridal vendor BHLDN.

Year founded: 1970

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