BullStreet breaks ground on new building, largest of its kind in South Carolina
Amid a flurry of construction activity at Columbia’s downtown BullStreet district, the campus’s newest commercial building broke ground Thursday.
The five-story, 79,000 square foot WestLawn office and retail building will be built behind the recently opened Starbucks cafe, a stone’s throw from the Segra Park baseball stadium.
BullStreet officials say WestLawn will be unique as the largest private office building in South Carolina to be built using the relatively new construction technology known as mass timber, or cross-laminated timber. Mass timber is considered an environmentally sustainable construction technology compared to more typical steel and cement construction. There are fewer than 400 large buildings of this kind in the United States, according to The New York Times.
WestLawn will create “38% less carbon by its production, because of the production type, than a traditional steel or concrete building,” said Robert Hughes, president of Hughes Development Corp., which is the master developer of the BullStreet campus. “It also will create some of the most beautiful office space you could create, with wood ceilings, wood walls. It will create a really special environmont ... that we think will differentiate the building from others in the market and, really, others in the Southeast.”
At the groundbreaking event, Columbia Mayor Steve Benjamin called WestLawn “another momentous announcement” for the district, adding that “the vision (of BullStreet) is coming to life.”
The building’s anchor tenant will be Columbia’s Robinson Gray Stepp & Laffitte law firm, occupying the top two floors of the building, including a private rooftop terrace.
The firm reached out to BullStreet developers in 2019 expressing interest in moving to the campus, hoping to find an office in one of BullStreet’s historic buildings. None of the remaining historic buildings at the 181-acre campus fit the law firm’s needs. “How about something cool and new?” Hughes said he offered.
The building’s modern-style architecture will complement the newly built REI Co-op, Starbucks and Merrill Gardens senior living buildings. It will stand beside the facade of the historic Williams Building, which is slated to be incorporated into another yet-to-be-announced development.
The first floor of WestLawn is to house a retail business or businesses, and the remaining floors will be Class A office space.
The building is expected to open by April 2022.
This story was originally published March 25, 2021 at 3:44 PM.
