Ryan Companies US, Inc. recently completed construction of Arcadia, Wisconsin-based Ashley Furniture Industries, Inc.’s 453,500-square-foot build-to-suit at Boldt Park, an 80-acre industrial business park in Romeoville, IL, developed by Ryan Companies US, Inc. Located at 1045 W. Crossroads Parkway, the building is one of the largest build-to-suit projects in 2014 in the Chicago area and includes office, retail showroom and warehouse/distribution space.
“Ashley Furniture chose Boldt Park because it is a great location site along the I-55 corridor,” John Dunneback, Director of Development for Ryan, said. “They were searching for a presence in that area, and our site checked off all of the boxes for what they were looking for.”
Established in 1945, Ashley Furniture Industries, Inc. is one of the largest manufacturer of furniture in the world, and offers one of the industry’s broadest product assortments to retail partners in more than 100 countries.
According to Dunneback, the new building for Ashley Furniture was developed on approximately 22 acres of land. The building includes a two-story customer service office totaling approximately 13,000 square feet of space as well as a two-story retail furniture outlet – the first in Romeoville – featuring 60,000 square feet of space. The balance of the space, totaling approximately 380,500 square feet, is a warehouse distribution center.
In regards to the building’s two-story retail furniture outlet Dunneback said, “They’re in the process of completing the tenant improvement work right now. It’ll be nice to see once completed, which will probably be towards the end of January, beginning of February.”
The magnitude and scope of the Ashley Furniture project earned a spot as a finalist for the 2014 Industrial Development of the Year in the 27th Annual Awards for Excellence program of the Chicago Chapter of NAIOP, the Commercial Real Estate Development Association.
“It was great to be one of the finalists,” Dunneback said. “NAIOP had a great turn out, and overall it was a great event.”
As well as being the developer of the project, Ryan Companies also served as the general contractor. Those efforts were led by Kyle Schott, Project Manager; Gary Dini, Senior Superintendent; and Jim Herbst, Division Manager. Other members of the project team included Harris Architects, architect, and SPACECO, civil engineer.
The new Ashley Furniture facility has been constructed to incorporate green and sustainable building materials and practices, according to Dunneback.
“We’ve utilized T5 high-efficiency motion-sensored warehouse lighting,” he said. “That’ll help Ashley Furniture out with their electrical usage as the lights turn off in areas where no one is present, and the sensors are triggered to turn on as each person walks into a space and occupies it.”
Dunneback also noted that Ryan Companies utilized a lot of materials located within close proximity of the site. “Our precast, similar to our concrete, is coming from Aurora, which is relatively close to the site,” he said. “Also roofing wise, the building has an R-25 EPDM ballasted roof system. That helps with heating during the winter, and trying to keep those gas usage costs down.”
Other design highlights of the new facility include high-efficiency Low-E punched and ribbon glass windows and storefront glass, 40-foot clear ceiling height, 50-by-54-foot typical bay sizes, 7-inch thick Ductile-crete floor slab, 91 dock door positions, parking for 254 automobiles and a will-call pickup area for customers.
“The building isn’t LEED certified,” said Dunneback. “Yet what we’ve built is your standard sustainable facility. We figured out a lot of those ideas up front in the design, so having made those decisions early on really helped with trying to keep it a cost effective model, and gave us the ability to use a lot of sustainable features.”
Other than building the facility during the harsh winter, Dunneback said they didn’t run into any serious problems. “We have a have great construction group here, so with our design teams—Harris Architects and SPACECO— they work really well together, and we’ve done a lot of projects with these consultants. So we were really able to pinpoint if we were going to come across any issues to catch them before they became major issues.”
“The winter weather was a difficult one though,” he continued. “That was probably our biggest issue that we had building this throughout the winter. Just getting over that cold, and the amount of snow we had this year was rough.” Despite the harsh winter, Dunneback said it was a fantastic project for Ryan Companies.
“We’re happy and we loved working with Ashley Furniture, they’re a great client,” he said. “Working in the village of Romeoville is always a pleasure as they have a great group of people there as well. We’re happy with how it turned out.”
Traci Buckingham and David Prioletti, both from CBRE, represented Ryan Companies in the build-to-suit for sale transaction. Aaron Hodgdon of the Hodgdon Group and Chuck Johanns of JLL represented Ashley Furniture.