Renovated landmark filling up swiftly

Former hospital, county office building gets serious makeover

By NANCY KIMBALL/Daily Inter Lake

A century of Kalispell history on Fifth Avenue East, framed with decidedly modern design, is ready to roll again.

Artists and professionals are cozying into their new quarters at Eastside Brick as developers put finishing touches on one last condominium and a couple of work studios in the 1911-vintage Kalispell General Hospital building.

"Everybody that's been in the building has been ecstatic about it," developer Vince Padilla said this week from DEV Properties' lower-level office in the four-story brick building. "We haven't had any naysayers in years."

A previous developer had raised hackles with plans to demolish the building and replace it with a venture that, some feared, would destroy the homey, quiet neighborhood along the historic tree-lined street.

But Dave Rickert, Eric Berry (who died in May) and Padilla, the original managing members in DEV Properties, had a neighbor-friendly vision when they bought the old hospital in April 2005.

Built in 1911 with six- and eight-inch concrete floors and 18-inch brick walls, the city's original hospital was a bastion of solidity and soundproofing rarely found in modern construction. A wing was added to the south in 1948 and another to the north in 1964.

The hospital stayed in operation until county offices relocated there in 1973 or 1974.

The county vacated what had come to be known as Courthouse East when the justice center and other new construction went up near the original courthouse on South Main, and the building went up for sale.

After they bought the property, Rickert, Berry and Padilla aimed to salvage every square inch possible from the original structure - including three-inch-thick true plaster walls.

They let daylight pour in through the 4-by-8-foot original windows, replace electrical, plumbing and heating with exposed mechanical works, retrofit living and working spaces with crisp lines and ecologically conscious interiors, impound water with swales for native landscaping features and replace the former boiler building with a coffee shop ready for an entrepreneur to start an independent business.

Today the 65,000-square-foot Eastside Brick project is doing its heritage proud.

It's a unique setting, where those who live there and those who work there intermingle.

"It has a community feeling," Rickert said, recapping progress since construction began in earnest in January 2007. "There's a warm feeling" among the residents and professionals and the character of the building itself.

As several of the spaces are compact - they range from 405 up to 1,800 square feet - the developers designed a community area to extend everybody's living and working space. It offers a conference room with solid-wood table and wall-mounted flat-screen TV, a kitchen, a light-drenched workout room, and changing rooms and shower.

Padilla said 27 of the 28 residences are filled, with one final condominium nearly completed. Two of the eight live/work art studios remain open, and one is being sold unfinished to an artist who wants to customize it to his own needs.

Ten of the 30 office spaces still are up for rent or sale.

"We had wanted to sell all the office spaces," Padilla said, "but with the economic slowdown, rentals are more popular."

The occupant mix is diverse.

Henning and Keedy Attorneys at Law bought three spaces on the north wing's main floor, where the firm holds the largest professional suite in the building.

Down the hall and on other floors are psychologists, massage therapists, painters and other artists, professional photographers, a transcriptionist, a nutritionist, and a naturopath who says her practice has tripled since moving to Eastside Brick from her former quarters just a block away.

Uniqueness of that mixed living and working community is a big draw.

"There's no place in Kalispell where you will get what you have here," Padilla said. And simply the fact that rentals suddenly are available on Kalispell's coveted east side is huge.

"There are very few rentals on the east side. And these are affordable," he said, with rates starting at $700.

Sixty people now live in the residential units and another 24 work in the office spaces. About 100 people should populate the building when it is fully occupied.

Most of the buyers, Rickert said, already lived within a four- or five-block radius of Eastside Brick or had moved out of their original neighborhood and wanted to come back "home."

That historic value is a big attraction.

"A lot of people have told me they were born in the building or had all their children in the building … And most of them were born in my living room," said Padilla, who lives with his family in what once was the hospital's fourth-floor birthing room. Rickert's family will move into the far end of the top floor, where three tubs and several walls told of its former life as a patient recovery room.

Original flooring, glass wall tiles, display cabinets, original brick, decorative cornices and much more, including the original floor plan, have been preserved.

"We get a lot of praise for saving the building," Padilla said.

And they get questions every week from people waiting for the coffee shop to open.

"We hoped if we built it, someone would want to buy it," he said. "We've had a lot of tire kickers," but have no name on the dotted line yet. As a contingency, Padilla and his daughter are putting together a business plan to see if it could work for them.

For the overall project, a timeline is in place to have everything done by the end of the year. But Rickert and Padilla said the majority of the work will be finished at the end of November.

Eastside Brick is open to the public between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., with a security system in place outside those hours. To find out more, visit www.eastsidebrick.com or call Padilla at 270-6692.

Reporter Nancy Kimball can be reached at 758-4483 or by e-mail at nkimball@dailyinterlake.com