- Hello, I'm Hernz Laguerre Jr. With Brick by Brick.

According to Moody's Analytics, about 20% of office spaces in major US cities are vacant.

With the increasing need for more housing in the country, developers are looking into how they can repurpose office buildings into residential spaces.

This process is called adaptive reuse.

You're taking a place that used to serve one purpose and then adapting it to serve another purpose.

In Dayton, private development firm Windsor Companies has a lot of experience in this approach, with several projects under their belt already in the metro area.

Their most recent project is with the 22-story mid-century modern Grant Deneau Tower.

This was the first modern high rise in downtown Dayton, and now the goal is to adapt the space into a luxury apartment and retail attraction.

I took a tour with the developers to see the details that it took to transform an office building into an apartment building.

Take a look.

The Grand Deneau Tower across from the Dayton Arcade was built as a state-of-the-art office tower in the 1960s, but stood empty for a number of years.

Jason Dorsey is the executive vice President of asset management at the company that is behind transformation, Windsor Companies.

- Hey listen, we bought a tower, we bought a skyscraper and we're gonna turn into residential, commercial and restaurant, - And turned his mid-century modern office into a 21st century building, which is no small task.

- Dorsey: Where does all the plumbing go?

Running up through the middle of the building and where does it, you know, where does everything run?

And these are all things that were, to me, the hardest, daunting tasks engineering - Wise.

Hernz: On top of that, the tower was not so energy efficient because of the window glass.

The building's heating and cooling costs were so high that no one could afford to make the building profitable.

Alex Manno: So we gutted the entire building, all of the mechanical, and we installed a VRF system.

- Hernz: Alex Manno, director of construction for Windsor stressed the importance of having energy efficient glass.

In addition to the variable refrigerant flow system or VRF that Manno mentioned.

They installed glass that was less thick than the original glass, - Manno: However, it's four times higher of an insulating property than regular insulated glass.

Oh, wow.

So they use these micro pillars in order to stand the glass off from each other, and then there's a lot more technology that goes into it.

That's even over my, it's amazing.

- Hernz: And on top of creating an energy efficient building, Windsor Companies had to follow strict building requirements because 20% of the $50 million project was being covered by the historical tax credits.

- Dorsey: When you have historical tax credits, you have historical guidelines.

- Hernz: The skyscraper was listed on the national register of his historical places in 2016, which means they had to keep or work around some historical elements such as, - Manno: We did have to preserve there.

There are these mailboxes within each floor.

Oh yeah.

So that was one of the elements that were part of the historical requirements that we had to keep Dorsey: With it being a historical property, as an office building, you could only put in carpet squares or concrete.

- Hernz: And they couldn't alter one of the most historic pieces of the building.

It's facade, also known to architects as the curtain wall.

- Manno: But the biggest, the biggest obstacle definitely is the curtain wall.

Oh yeah.

It would've been easier to, it would've been cheaper.

It would've been easier to just build a brand.

You know, you take, take the old one down, you put a brand new one up and you're done.

- This sounds like a lot to handle, but this isn't the Windsor Company's first rodeo.

They've worked on projects just like this all across the Dayton metro area, including the former Price Stores building at Fourth and South Jefferson, the Journal Herald Building at one 11 East fourth Street, and the Graphic Arts building at 221 South Ludlow Street.

And the company is able to accomplish this because they are vertically integrated, meaning that they own their own suppliers, including plumbing and electrical services.

- Manno: Vertical integration allows for two things, control and speed.

So all of the labor is in-house.

And then when you control that, you're not beholden to subcontractors.

- Hernz: And this comes in handy when you need to create items like mullion covers.

Don't worry, I had no idea what mullion covers were either.

A mullion is that vertical bar between two panes of glass.

The Grant Deneau's mullions needed covers to complete the design Windsor wanted.

But you can't go to your local hardware store or go online to purchase them.

- Manno: We built custom made mul covers, essentially in our 3D shop.

It even allows us really nice to stuff in installation here.

That would've probably been very difficult just to find you can't, - Hernz: Windsor's ability to innovate while they develop is a skill set that allows them to make unique luxury apartments in Dayton.

- Dorsey: It's a very high end look.

It's a, it's a very, it's, I, we, you know, my brother's like, "Hey, make it look like some, you know, nothing like anybody's ever seen in Dayton."

And I think that's what we did.

- Charlynda Scales is one of the owners of 6888 Kitchen Incubator.

The facility is housed in the Dayton Arcade as they provide resources for restaurants in the area.

And they are a stone throw away from the Grant Deneau to know.

Scales shares what she thinks the renovated tower will do for local businesses.

- What they're also doing is helping these small businesses become big businesses.

So as we saw in the pandemic, a lot of these restaurants going outta business is because people were not residing here long, you know, long enough to stay and patron the food businesses - Hernz: And for the next project.

Windsor is not just looking into luxury apartments.

- Dorsey: We actually think that that might be the next step for us.

Yeah.

Affordable housing and adaptive reuse.

You know, the, these big tall buildings would be, I mean, they're safe.

We make them efficient.

We think that there's a great need for it.

- Hernz: When reading about adaptive reuse, it honestly did it no justice when, when seeing the amount of work it took to take an office building and transform it into an apartment building, the amount of unknowns, the surprises that you'll encounter along the way with adaptive reuse is, is a lot.

Windsor Company's vertically integrated model handles those surprises and unknowns well.

So whether they stay within the market rate housing, or move into affordable housing, there's a lot to learn with Windsor's approach to adaptive reuse.

For Brick by Brick, I'm Hernz Laguerre Jr.