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Keith Winn, president of Catalyst Partners, wanted to prove that LEED-rated buildings could be done on a budget and still be fully functional, efficient spaces. PHOTOS: JOE BOOMGAARD

By Joe Boomgaard | MiBiz
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GRAND RAPIDS—In some cases, when you want the best, you have to go out and make it yourself.

That was the case when Keith Winn, president of Catalyst Partners, set out to prove that a building that had the most LEED points of any in the world could also be affordable to design and construct.

“People do (LEED) for different reasons. In our case, this is an incubator for us to experiment with different technology. The basic premise is to end up with an affordable building,” Winn told MiBiz in an exclusive interview. “Everyone says you can do LEED on a budget and we wanted to prove we could do that. With some technology, there’s not a quick payback. But photovoltaics and geothermal are common sense and low-tech things (that help make) a very efficient project. What I want to prove to the marketplace is that you can do a project like this and save money in operations and still certify these projects.”

Winn embedded himself in the green building movement since helping start the U.S. Green Building Council while working for office furniture manufacturer Herman Miller. But after being downsized in that industry’s implosion about eight years ago, he created Catalyst Partners and set to work on developing LEED standards, specifically the rating system for the LEED for Commercial Interiors program.

Over the past three or four years, he’s built a consortium of experts to help him with certification reviews for LEED projects. International projects and volume buildings certifications, where a national company might build dozens of replications of a LEED-certified project over the span of a couple of years, meant expansion for Catalyst Partners. After the interview, Winn was scheduled to fly off to the Netherlands and Croatia to consult on first-of-their-kind LEED projects in those countries.

“We grew along with it,” he said. “We were growing and we were in a small office space downtown on the corner of Ionia and Monroe Center, and had been there for six or seven years with the same landlord. We wanted to move to bigger space and were ready to commit to a 10-year lease. But we thought we’d look around at space or for a building. We spent a year looking at what was available and set a deadline to make a decision.”

Eventually, that search would lead him to an abandoned building, formerly a flourmill and an engine repair shop, at 502 Second Street on the West Side neighborhood of Grand Rapids. Winn eventually paired up with Chris Muller, owner of the real estate services company M Retail Solutions, who had been co-renting a space and was also in the market for a more permanent office.

“We made an offer and got accepted at the bottom of the market. We got a great deal and some incentives to do a brownfield assessment,” Winn said. “It was the right size so we both could occupy the building and cut our risk in half. We’re complementary. Chris is in the number crunching side and works to broker real estate, and I’m involved in the design and development side. We put the project together and figured out what we wanted to do, (and) we learned a lot in the process.”

Considering the timing of the purchase, Winn said financing was not hard to find since the project was 100-percent owner-occupied. In fact, he had three banks give him an offer. SBA-backed loans covered half of the project, while brownfield credits and other state incentives helped make the project feasible, he said.

“In the end, it worked out for us with the incentives combined with breaking up loans with different institutions,” he said.

Part of the incentives required that the structure be barrier-free, meaning they would have had to put in an elevator or lift. The original conceptual design included adding a third story and some sort of lift, but the structure wouldn’t support it. The parking area, entrance, lower level and main-level bathrooms were barrier-free, but not the upper levels, so the partners had to apply for an exemption, which again took time out of the process.

“Our biggest cost and expense was dealing with the problems related to the brownfield and accessibility. Everything else was easy,” he said.

However, working through the brownfield process proved frustrating at times because of the delays involved in additional studies of the land’s contamination.

The partners hired Wolverine Building Inc. for the design and build-out of the 2,825-square-foot project, which included remodeling the two-story structure into office space. While the building was relatively small, it included four floor levels that posed challenges for the project. Winn and the members of the Catalyst team modeled the structure out of pizza boxes to help visualize the changes and how the design would work in the space.

“While excavating for the foundations of the addition we found that the footings and foundations from the original flourmill at that location were never removed,” Kurt Adams, construction manager at Wolverine Building Group, told MiBiz. “Even though we had done numerous borings on the site, we had never actually hit one so we never knew they were there.”

The excavations also uncovered a long-abandoned brick alley that Winn was able to salvage and reuse on the site. Other reused items, ranging from doors and floors to lockers, came from Iroquois Middle School.

“Keith and Chris were both very involved throughout the construction, and they both have a lot of time and blood into the project,” Adams stated. “Their creativity in the use of recycled materials is nothing short of amazing.”

Where reuse wasn’t possible, they added windows for better lighting and replaced old windows with Energy Star-rated fixtures. The design allows for operating the structure for three months out of the year with no mechanical ventilation or added heating and cooling.

All lighting fixtures were high-efficiency rated and armed with daylight and occupancy sensors that will eventually be controllable through smart phone technology, he added. Powering those systems, in part, are a series of photovoltaic panels on the south-facing side of the building.

Winn said the design emphasized not releasing stormwater off the site. The pavement is angled to drain to a swale at the rear of the property, and a cistern currently can collect about 1,000 gallons from a good rain event. The cistern will eventually be fitted with a pump to be used for irrigation of the several onsite gardens. Additionally, Calvin students helped with a native plant rescue to create four onsite “ecoscapes,” including a dry prairie, tall grass meadow, wetland and forest.

“It’s an experiment, but the whole notion is to be completely sustainable and harvest and produce our own food on site and connect to local transportation while preserving an old building and having zero stormwater discharge. We’re aiming to be off the grid some day,” Winn said. “It’s a fun process to experiment with all these ideas. You might get an owner to push the envelope on one or two, but we’re doing all of them.”

Winn wants to complete the LEED certification next spring or summer once he has the chance to install more solar panels. As the project stands currently, he believes he’s at least four or five points ahead of any other LEED project.

“Part of moving over here is part of my personal commitment to the city,” Winn said. “I love what’s going on in Grand Rapids. We’ve done a lot, but there’s a lot of potential here. It’s exciting to be on the front end. There are tons of opportunities ahead of us.

“I love the urban environment, being a part of Grand Rapids and connected to downtown. We’re discovering local meat markets and shops on the West Side. Part of the sustainable idea is to revitalize neighborhoods and downtowns and get people living downtown. I’m very much a supporter of that, beyond just the green building part. I love that about this city. There’s a huge commitment here.”