Whole Foods Market- Montrose

Whole Foods Market Montrose is 45,000 sf retail space, that includes a coffee lounge and dining area, sales floor, kitchen/service area, food storage area and administrative offices. Store features include:

• sustainable elements, such as natural light, LED lighting inside and outside, and solar tracking skylights, which adjust interior lighting based on ambient natural light; reclaimed Texas woods; and a secondary cooling system for refrigeration and air conditioning that uses a water loop to displace heat
• in-store wine and cheese bar, a self-serve barbecue bar and a taco bar
• indoor/outdoor seating area enclosed (or not) by retractable garage-style doors
• 10 full-service cashier lanes and six express lanes
• a 32-foot beer cooler

Structures also provided structural services for signage, including monumental sign, pedestrian signs and shell building signs.

The shell was a suspended, voided foundation system supported on drilled straight shaft piers. CMU block wall, structural steel framing, and open web steel joist construction. The tenant finish out is soil supported slab on grade with depressions as required for coolers and freezers. Cold-formed and structural steel framed hanging soffits, ceilings, and hoods.

Project Challenges consisted of:

• Large, unique hanging soffits and ceilings in tenant finish out. Due to the tenant’s high end finish out desires, large atypical soffits were designed by the architect. These were so unusual that structural engineering was required for their support and the soffit frame integrity itself. In the end large unusual shaped soffits appear to be floating throughout the store.
• Accordion door support. A large accordion door was required at the mezzanine. The configuration of the framing designed during the shell phase was done so without knowledge of this possibility as is the case quite often with shell and finish out phases. Because of this a large amount of steel would be required to support the door. We proposed instead of spanning to the next column line, a post was sized to fit within the finish out wall to support a much smaller steel beam and saved on the cost of steel including fabrication and labor.
• Tall CMU loading dock wall. Due to the height, pilasters were required along the length of the wall. However we were able to design the pilasters to be only expressed on one side, within the loading dock, allowing the shell façade to be unaffected and not compromise the architect’s intent.

Architect

Stone Soup 6

Size

45,000 sf

Location

Houston, TX