Soutbridge Project Delayed, But Not Deterred By Recession

Modest would be a good, one-word description of the Victorian-era brick building at 319 Main St. in Southbridge.

But Sustainable Refurbishment, the development company run by University of Limerick physicist Colm Cryan, had anything but modest plans for the building at the end of 2007 when he set about renovating it.

Despite undertaking the project just as the economy was about to tank, Cryan expects it to be complete by September. Then, its seven apartments and three retail shops will act as a veritable laboratory for the latest high-efficiency building techniques and materials.

Sustainable Refurbishment will monitor how energy efficient all of the special windows, HVAC equipment, electrical components, mechanical systems, “light-catching technology” and building materials have made the units, Cryan said.

The building, which is known as Memorial Hall, is also on schedule to become LEED Silver certified.

“Once we start monitoring, we’ll feed that data into class and start learning from it,” Cryan said.

The project is quite a feat, even to veteran contractor Steve Stutman, the general contractor on the Memorial Hall project. Stutman said the project has made it apparent that Europe is well ahead of the United States in the adoption of energy efficiency measures for construction projects.

“It’s pretty impressive,” Stutman said. “The building was vacant and really dilapidated.”

And that wasn’t the only challenge.

Cryan said the economy put the project behind schedule by between nine months and a year right from the beginning.

Money Matters

“It has been a tough one. It’s taken a lot of commitment from all the team,” Cryan said. “The recession delayed things, and it was just sitting there burning money. On the plus side, you do tend to get better pricing in a recession. The problem is cash flow.”

Cryan said he built “very large margins” into the project’s costs from the beginning. “In a normal environment [the margins] would’ve been considered excessive, but when things got rough we needed them.”

Throughout the project, Sustainable Refurbishment met with Cassandra Acly, the town’s economic development and planning director, every other week.

The regular communication helped the project get all the sign-offs it needed without any delays the developer didn’t expect.

Also important was honesty about what could be accomplished at Memorial Hall, which Cryan said is “better than a typical new building today, but we can’t make it better than the best-built buildings of today.”